This week I have another bony mystery object for you:
This one is currently on display in the beautiful Words on the Wave exhibition at the National Museum of Ireland on Kildare Street, but the focus is on the inscription on the bone, rather than the species the bone came from:
So, I’d love to hear your thoughts on what this is? Have fun with it!
Last week I had a genuine mystery object for you to identify that was freshly dug out of the ground:
While there were a few suggestions of baked goods on social media, plenty of you spotted what it actually is – with a nod to Adam Yates who was first with the correct identification.
The side view is probably the most useful for setting context, as it shows the smooth curve of the head of an articular surface, with an adjacent tuberosity (or sticky-up-bit, if you prefer):
This is what you expect to see at the proximal end of a humerus (that’s bit that works with the shoulder). It’s pretty big – the scale bar is 8cm and the head of this humerus is a good bit wider across, so that also tells us something.
Another key observation comes from the underside of the humerus head:
You can just make out a rugose pattern on the underside of this piece of bone, which tells us that this is an unfused epiphysis that has become detached from the rest of the humerus. That means the animal that this piece of bone came from was young enough to still be growing, as the bones hadn’t fused.
All of that information leads us to the conclusion that the animal this piece of humerus came from was large, but still young. For me, that says that this humerus is from a Cow Bos taurus Linnaeus, 1758.
I suspect this mystery object represents the remains of a Victorian meal, based on where it was found – just under the floor of the Dead Zoo. It came to light during the investigation works on the building, which are currently underway. The building work started in 1856, so that gives us a good idea of when this beef shoulder was probably eaten.
This week’s mystery object is a return to bony form, with a genuine mystery object dug straight out of the ground:
Any idea what this could be? I’m keen to hear your thoughts in the comments below – I hope you have fun with it!
Last week I gave you this colourful chap to have a go at identifying:
As I mentioned in the previous mystery object answer, parrots can be hard to identify due to the large number of species globally. However, this time the specimen posed no problems for people to identify – perhaps unsurprisingly, given its importance.
Chris Jarvis was first in the door with the correct answer – a nice cryptic clue using the Seminole name for the species:
What a Puzz ila!
Other clues came thick and fast, but they all pointed to this yellow-headed, orange-faced bird being the now extinct Carolina Parakeet Conuropsis carolinensis (Linnaeus, 1758).
This colourful small parrot weighed in at around 100g and hung around in large flocks of up to 300 birds. Until the middle of the 19th Century they were commonplace in swampy forest habitats in parts of North America. The main resident population was in Florida although their range spread northwards along the marshes of the East coast (into the Carolinas) and westwards along the Gulf of Mexico just into Louisana.
A subspecies of the Carolina Parakeet (C. c. ludovicianus) also occurred in much of the Midwest and as far south as the top of Texas and as far north as the bottom of New York state. This subspecies had bodies that were more blue, but they disappeared alongside their greener sibling subspecies by the beginning of the 20th Century.
It seems likely that the usual culprits played a role in the extinction of North America’s only endemic parrot – habitat loss and overhunting. Swamps were drained and forests cleared to make way for agricultural land, the birds were then shot for feeding on crops, and their beautiful plumage made the birds a target to supply the feather-forward fashions of the time.
While most of the shooting stopped before the birds went extinct, as people started to recognise the risk of extinction (especially in the context of the Passenger Pigeon that was being eradicated at around the same time), the last small wild population was vulnerable and it has been suggested that they were finally wiped out by an avian disease.
While a few stragglers likely remained living wild in the Florida swamps until the 1930s, the last known Carolina Parakeet (a male named Incas) died in Cincinati Zoo in 1918, just four years after Martha (the last Passenger Pigeon) died in the very same cage. A somewhat dismal end to colourful species.
Zygoma 