Last week I gave you this ‘unidentified bone’ to have a go at identifying:

I say bone, but as was pointed out on Twitter, perhaps the label reads something else…

I’m not even sure it’s accidental. There is a curator with a sense of humour there!

— Steve (@SteveTypesStuff) January 24, 2020

‘Boner’ would of course be an accurate slip, because this is clearly a baculum (aka the penile bone, os penis, os priapi, or oosik in the case of pinnipeds). I don’t think the slip was deliberate though, since I removed a piece of information from the label for the sake of the challenge:

I can only imagine that this baculum was found with some seal bones and was not recognised as being part of the skeleton and therefore removed. There’s no reference to where the rest of the seal bones are, which is bit of a problem if they are in the collection.

I’ve blogged about penile bones on several occasions, since as far back as in 2010.  Bacula are often quite distinctive, allowing species identifications based on their morphology. But this particular specimen has proven hard to find good specific comparative material or images (online or in publications) to do comparisons against.

However, from looking at the few seal bacula that do have illustrations in publications, and scouring the internet for articulated seal skeletons with bacula in place, I think it’s probably from male Grey Seal Halichoerus grypus (Fabricius, 1791). If so, this individual would have likely been aged 10 years or over.

This age suggestion is based on the length and robustness of the specimen, which in Grey Seals has been shown to correlate quite closely with age and maturity in the males (Hewer, 1964; Van Bree, 1972). This interesting bit of information aside, I unfortunately couldn’t find the clues that led palfreyman1414 to the Holmesian deduction:

…So, apart from the fact that they are right-handed, have been to Afghanistan, currently work as a haberdasher’s spool threader and have fallen on hard times, I got nothing.

But bacula are informative bones, so I’m sure there is a lot of additional information available from the specimen that I’ve not deduced.

All of you worked out what this bone(r) was, and several people recognised it as being from a seal of some kind, both in the blog comments and on Twitter. There was also a suggestion of Grey Seal from Conor Ryan:

Although I’m no expert on penis size…. I’m gonna guess grey seal baculum, based only on the length. #shlong

— Conor Ryan (@whale_nerd) January 24, 2020

I hope you had fun with this mystery boner! Oh wait, that sounds really wrong.