Country diary: The grisly beauty of an otter postmortem

The Guardian12 Jun 2026Market
Automatically composed with AI from the cited sources

Otter No 4,888 was found as roadkill near the River Cefni on Anglesey in November 2024 and sent frozen to Cardiff University’s Otter Project, which dissects around 200 otters annually, the vast majority being road casualties. Postmortem revealed a pool of blood indicating catastrophic internal injuries and a mass on the pancreas—possibly cancerous—retained for further testing; the young female’s body was otherwise intact externally.