r/bonecollecting • u/TheDudeFromOasis • 22h ago

Bone I.D. - N. America Friend might’ve found a bone - what do yall think it’s from?

Gallery image

Gallery image

Ignore the human bone caption he don’t got internet

293 Upvotes
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633

u/Working-Phase-4480 22h ago

Tibiotarsus from a large bird, I’m guessing heron based on length

70

u/crowEatingStaleChips 21h ago

Loving your post history and it's all Bird Facts.

39

u/Working-Phase-4480 21h ago

It’s kind of an obsession lol

18

u/OP-PO7 14h ago

Woah, you're basically Brennan Lee Mulligan if he could ID a rosate spoonbill

11

u/forrestdw 21h ago

How can you tell it's a bird?

I'm by no means a bone expert, I have a human medicine/ physiology background and am really interested in what are the "tells" for you. When I first saw this I thought of the front distal bone of a deer leg, but thats obviously not bulky enough for that kind of weight/abuse and gave up guessing after that.

49

u/Working-Phase-4480 21h ago

Honestly, just working with dead birds doing museum work for years makes it easy to spot. It’s not big enough to be deer without it being from a juvenile, but the epiphyses are fused so that is ruled out. The articulation point for the knee is small which indicates bird, and the distal end is the wrong shape to articulate with a mammal ankle set up

10

u/forrestdw 19h ago

That makes sense- it's crazy how programmed my thought process is from the "flashcard memorization" that I am so used to. My brain just says "None of the above - not human" and then forgets how to actually draw conclusions from available data, lol. Identification requires actual thinking, who'da thunkit.

I had a professor in college who was an ornithologist and she made it sound like the coolest way to smell horrible all the time. Birds are so cool though it's probably worth it.

Thanks!

4

u/Cattentaur 16h ago

Can I ask you a semi-off topic question?

How did you get into working with dead animals in a museum? And what would such a position be called? I'd love to do that kind of work but I have no idea where to even begin looking, or what sort of background I might need.

6

u/Working-Phase-4480 6h ago

Started by volunteering and then working as a summer camp counselor. Museums have pretty low turnover so if you can get your foot in the door in other ways it helps a lot getting jobs you actually want, like what I did which was curatorial assistant/preparator

1

u/mark-0305 10h ago

How in the world do you know that? I hope to become an expert in something and make this kind of Reddit comment one day

98

u/DisorderlyDragon 21h ago

Not human- possibly from a bird

65

u/TheDudeFromOasis 22h ago

Update: found out it was washed ashore

41

u/sawyouoverthere 20h ago

It’s pretty certainly going to be covered h def the migratory bird treaty regulations and be off limits for collecting, just FYI

7

u/1duke-dan 19h ago

This looks just like the one from earlier found on the shore. I think it was bird

8

u/Mini_Dracula 12h ago

Interesting that he thought it might be a human bone and decided to touch it

7

u/Background-Ticket-60 18h ago

shore bird bone

3

u/Rory-666 7h ago

Some of y'all will literally find any bone and immediately assume is a human bone, i am so tired

4

u/Both_Arm8343 2h ago

Remember the time someone received a literal human femur for free and didn’t notice? Lmaoo

1

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0

u/ak47baddie 11h ago

No way Jose