Hyperostotic Fish Skull on Project Noah
Project Noah is a citizen science project a bit like iNaturalist, where people can submit their observations (or "spottings") of all kingdoms of life and solicit help in identifying the organisms.
I've been on there for about four months now, helping ID bone spottings. They have a project (or "mission") "Identifying Animals Through Osteology" that made a lot of the work easy initially, but only the spotter can add their spottings to missions, which meant to find others I have to search tags like "skull", "bone", "skeleton", etc. Nothing new to me, it's something I do a lot here on iNat too, but it takes a lot more time to find things and a lot slip through the cracks. This nifty fish skull was one of them.
Can't believe I left a tilly bone (tilly skull? The skull is composed of a lot more than just one bone...) go under my radar for that long on a site that is relatively tiny compared to here (as I write this, iNat has a total of 37,198,030 observations including casual grades, while Project Noah has 835,842 spottings), but I'm glad I finally got to it and not only got to ID it on there but share it here.
No clue personally what the species is unfortunately, but being able to identify the pathology was probably what the spotter wanted more anyway. As you can read in the spotting description:
"Marine animal skull. Large boney device on back of head. One of the strangest items I've ever found on a beach."
Its hyperostosis is pretty weird looking, it definitely fits the description of "swollen" better than a lot of tilly bones I see. Looks pretty plump, I think this is a very nice tilly skull.