a simple prop

Nice. I do so love bones, their strength, resiliency, artistic lines made even more poignant by their functionality. I love, too, how rife a bone is with information, skulls especially. There’s an entire encyclopedia in a skull.

Michael,
Extant species. They formed the data for my PhD dissertation. You can find copies of resultant papers at http://www.public.asu.edu/~jmlynch/publications.html – scroll down to 1997 and work backwards.
No explorers died (or dogs eaten) in the making of my research

The skull reads:
Из колл. С. У. Стро
ганова (From the collection of S. U. Stroganov)
южн-Прибал. (south-Pribal.)
[possibly Pribaltiysky: southern Baltic region]
The rest I’m just unsure of.
I did some searching on S.U. Stroganov, and it appears there was a fellow of the Western Siberian branch of the Soviet Academy of Sciences by this name; this table of contents shows him as the author of the first three monographs:
“Materials on the systematics of Siberian mammals”
“(A) new view of the shrew for Siberian fauna”
“Materals to(ward) the knowledge of Siberian mammalians (notes on nomenclature and systematics)”
Same guy? If so, interesting.

Genitive of male surnames is the -a phoneme (genitive because it’s the collection OF Stroganov), which is the same as the feminine nominal case. If it were a woman’s name, it would be Из колл. С. У. Строганови. Iz koll(ektsii) S.U. Stroganovi.