This week I have a bony mystery object for you to have a go at identifying:
Any idea what this solid piece of bone might be, and which animal it could be from?
As ever, you can leave your questions, thoughts and suggestions in the comments box below. I hope you enjoy the challenge!
Zygoma 
walking our dog can hear this command….
Hard to be cryptic here so I’ll just use technical language: Calcaneus, smallish artiodactyl, perhaps Ovis ?
That was my first thought, but on comparison, I changed my mind…
So with that mistake, my earlier post was not my greatest of all time.
You know what, my first thought may not have been so far off…
Looks like a mammal calcaneus bone, I’m not sure which species
OK smarty-pants! Left or right then….
Its all right…
I’d guess left, but I’m afraid I’m at a “Gee, that’s a weird shape” level when it comes to osteology.
(And it’s from a reasonably large mammal, even if the scale bar is in centimetres this time!)
Oh, deer.
About the size… On the basis of a very small number of examples found on the WWWeb, it looks as if cursorial animals (deer, horses) have longer calcanei (is that the correct plural, or is the Latin word one of those deceptive third or fourth declension nouns?): so if it were from an animal of that sort, it would be from a smallish one (hence Adam’s Ovis guess). But it might be from a larger, non-cursorial, animal: looks as if it’s the right size (though not, alas, the right shape) to be from a Wild Boar.
I’m badly out of my depth here, but… largish Carnivoran?
Largish yes, Carnivoran, not so much…
I am pretty sheepish to have taken so long to have finally LEFT my suggestion of what bone this could be..