This week I have an unidentified postcranial element for you to identify, which I came across in the Grant Museum of Zoology stores this week:
Any idea what it is and, more importantly, what it’s from?
You can leave your comments, questions and suggestions in the comments section below. Have fun!
Zygoma 
Is it 1/2 x diameter of a circle? Non-primate based on the processes around the proximal head (right side) allowing only incomplete rotation.
🙂
i’m rotating this to scratch my head… isn’t it distal to the right?
done in by my own confusion…. yes, agreed: distal to the right.
I’ve seen something like this in a goat once (a bit I was cooking – you can get good goat’s meat in Shepherd’s Bush Market and in Hounslow – I am guessing it would be available in Southall too, and I know it’s available in Brixton market as well).
Not that I am saying this is goat, just that it has a slightly familiar look.
And about 20 cm long. So that should narrow it down – not an elephant, not a shrew. In fact, something in the size range of humans I’d say, or slightly smaller.
I find it interesting that our senses evolved to make sense of our sizes and speed – we think something is heavy if it is heavy compared to us, quick if it is quicker than us, tall if it is taller than us, and so on. Yet we are probably in the 99th percentile of mammals in terms of size – there aren’t actually that many that are larger than us (although almost all that are are well known, which might lead to the perception that there are a number of them).
And if we take animals as a whole, given how prolific the insects are at speciation, we’re probably larger than 99.999% of all animals.
That is, we are very large animals, but we tend to think of ourselves as being normal sized, or medium sized…
Considering the size and shape: not an ungulate; possibly carnivore – marsupial even??? I definitely would need a large reference collection to identify this.