This weeks photo is a giant bone! I leave it to you to surmise which creature it belongs to….I hope you accept the challenge. Please post your guesses in the comment section below. If no one gets it within the first few hours I’ll start posting hints about the creature. You can click on the photo to enlarge it. Have fun!
Hint 1: This bone was discovered in the Yukon Territory and is housed at the Yukon Archaeological and Palaeontological Survey, which is where I took the photo. Their facility houses all of the bones found in the Yukon as well as all of the archaeological artefacts.
Well, the mystery has been solved. Congrats to everyone who provided the answer on Twitter as well.
The answer that you have all been waiting for is Wooly Mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius). Yep, this is a bone from a mammoth and it is all of a metre long!! Absolutely massive!
Here are some other pictures of mammoth remains that I snagged from the collection and the local museum.
A complete and gorgeous mammoth skeleton at the Beringia Centre in Whitehorse.
A tusk at the survey.
A newly discovered tusk that just arrived at the survey and had yet to be catalogued.
Cheers,
Matt
Tori Heridge
Looks like an elephant humerus to me. Humeri are pretty rubbish for identification within the Elephantinae, however given the location, it is probably a mammoth…
so Mammuthus columbi or Mammuthus primigenius (the latter is generally quite a bit smaller than the former, but without a scale & the perplexing issue of sexual dimorphism anyway…).
I don’t want to have to choose, but I’ll go for M. primigenius, solely because the bone doesn’t looked very mineralised & so likely to be young-ish and because woolly mammoth is that much more common!
herod
Bingo! The bone is Pleistocene in age, so relatively young and you’re right it is unmineralised. Congratulations! Wooly mammoths were very common in the Yukon and they are continually digging bones and tusks out of the permafrost. There is quite a thriving trade in mammoth ivory actually. Thanks for your comment!