All items sold on this website are polyurethane resin replicas, made in USA. No real or natural bone is available on this site.
Puffing Pigs Skull Replica measures 12.2 inches. Puffing Pigs Skull is museum quality polyurethane cast. 2-part skull (separate cranium & jaw). Made in USA.
Our precise skull can be used as a teaching tool, museum skull exhibit, home decor skull, or office decor skull.
The English word porpoise comes from the French pourpois (Old French porpais, 12th century), which is from Medieval Latin porcopiscus, which is a compound of porcus (pig) and piscus (fish).
The old word is probably a loan-translation of a Germanic word, compare Danish marsvin and Middle Dutch mereswijn (sea swine). Classical Latin had a similar name, porculus marinus. The species’ taxonomic name, Phocoena phocoena, is the Latinized form of the Greek “big seal”.
The species is known as the Common Harbour Porpoise in texts originating in the United Kingdom. In parts of Atlantic Canada it is known colloquially as the Puffing Pig, and in Norway ‘nise’, derived from an Old Norse word for sneeze; both of which refer to the sound made when porpoises surface to breathe.
The vocalizations of the Harbour Porpoise is made up of short clicks from 0.5 to 5 milliseconds in bursts up to two seconds long. Each click has a frequency between 1000 and 2200 hertz. Aside from communication, the clicks are used for echolocation.
The Harbor Porpoise skull has flat spade-shaped teeth, rounded head, and seperate cranium and jaw.
The Common Harbour Porpoise or Puffing Pig is one of six species of porpoise. It is one of the smallest marine mammals. As its name implies, it stays close to coastal areas or river estuaries, and as such, is the most familiar porpoise to whale watchers.
This porpoise often ventures up rivers, and has been seen hundreds of miles from the sea. Harbour porpoises prefer temperate and subarctic waters. They inhabit fjords, bays, estuaries and harbours, hence their name. The Harbour Porpoise is widespread in cooler coastal waters of the North Atlantic, North Pacific and the Black Sea.
The Common Harbour Porpoise or Puffing Pig is a little smaller than the other porpoises, at about 26 to 33 in. long at birth. Adults of both sexes grow to 4.6 to 6.2 ft. The females are heavier, with a maximum weight of around 168 lb. compared with the males at 134 lb.
The body is robust, and the animal is at its maximum girth just in front of its triangular dorsal fin. The beak is poorly demarcated.
The flippers, dorsal fin, tail fin and back are a dark grey. The sides are a slightly speckled, lighter grey. The underside is much whiter, though there are usually grey stripes running along the throat from the underside of the body.
They feed mostly on small pelagic schooling fish, particularly herring, pollack, hake, sardine, cod, capelin, and sprat. They will, however, eat squid and crustaceans.
Common Harbour Porpoise or Puffing Pigs are a least-concern species that has been categorized by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as evaluated as not being a focus of species conservation because the specific species is still plentiful in the wild.
