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- Aug 24, 2007
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Hey All,
This find is right out by back door. I live close to the south forks and have been doing research about it. Puts a new perspective on what you can find.
Link:
http://news.cincypost.com/apps/pbcs.dll/articleAID=/20070904/NEWS01/709040351
Content:
David Boyers was standing in about two feet of water in the South Fork of the Licking River when he saw what appeared to be a funny-looking log.
"Look at the size of this dinosaur bone," he yelled jokingly to his girlfriend, Amanda Plummer, and her son, Mikel.
The log's unusual shape looked enough like a bone - the kind a giant dog might chew on - that Boyers decided to keep it. So he threw it in his canoe and then in the back of his truck.
But when he examined the dried-out find more closely a few days later, he decided the inside of it looked suspiciously like bone marrow.
So Boyers, who lives in Highland Heights, Ky., took it to the Behringer-Crawford Museum in Covington, where archaeologist/anthropologist Jeannine Kreinbrink took one look and sent him to the paleontologists at the Cincinnati Museum Center.
With a little trepidation - "I didn't want to be embarrassed," Boyers said - he made an appointment.
He had no reason to be embarrassed.
The "log" was not a dinosaur bone. But it was the partial right ulna - think foreleg - of a mastodon, circa 20,000 years ago, said Dr. Glenn Storrs, assistant vice president for natural history and science at the museum.
"I immediately saw he did indeed have something," Storrs said. "It's pretty robust, well-preserved, not flaking apart. That's a danger for these bones, when they dry out."
Storrs said he identified the bone by matching it to a partial skeleton of a mastodon already in the museum's collection. Its age is an educated guess based on knowledge of geology and geography - that was the time period during which meltwater from continental ice sheets scoured up sediment and entombed bones from many animals in this area.
Storrs said the museum, which is a federal repository for bones and fossils, receives numerous phone calls from people who think they've found ancient bones. Usually they turn out to be from a modern animal or are just an unusual rock formation, but about one every year or two turns out to be a significant find. Most are single bones that had been washed away by glacial runoff and encased in rock and dirt, then found when a cliff or stream bank erodes.
Boyers said he decided to give the bone to the museum because it would be preserved there in climate-controlled cabinets.
Storrs said the bone would broaden the museum's database of mastodon fossils, a public record that can be examined by the scientific community to learn more about the ancient mammals. For example, the bone could help increase the understanding of mastodon densities.
In the future, as technology becomes more sophisticated, it also theoretically could become part of a DNA database, Storrs said.
Boyers does not remember the exact day of his find but thinks it was in mid-May.
He and Plummer had decided to go on a canoe trip and had put into the river just off Hay Station Road in Pendleton County. They were 15 to 20 minutes into the trip when they stopped near some riffles to fish. He was wading in a shallow pool of water, surrounded by rock islands, when he saw the bone. It was covered with moss or lichen and was pretty soggy, and one end had broken off.
"I've been on that river since I was 5 or 6," Boyers said. "It's amazing that I'm now 37 and run across this."
This find is right out by back door. I live close to the south forks and have been doing research about it. Puts a new perspective on what you can find.
Link:
http://news.cincypost.com/apps/pbcs.dll/articleAID=/20070904/NEWS01/709040351
Content:
David Boyers was standing in about two feet of water in the South Fork of the Licking River when he saw what appeared to be a funny-looking log.
"Look at the size of this dinosaur bone," he yelled jokingly to his girlfriend, Amanda Plummer, and her son, Mikel.
The log's unusual shape looked enough like a bone - the kind a giant dog might chew on - that Boyers decided to keep it. So he threw it in his canoe and then in the back of his truck.
But when he examined the dried-out find more closely a few days later, he decided the inside of it looked suspiciously like bone marrow.
So Boyers, who lives in Highland Heights, Ky., took it to the Behringer-Crawford Museum in Covington, where archaeologist/anthropologist Jeannine Kreinbrink took one look and sent him to the paleontologists at the Cincinnati Museum Center.
With a little trepidation - "I didn't want to be embarrassed," Boyers said - he made an appointment.
He had no reason to be embarrassed.
The "log" was not a dinosaur bone. But it was the partial right ulna - think foreleg - of a mastodon, circa 20,000 years ago, said Dr. Glenn Storrs, assistant vice president for natural history and science at the museum.
"I immediately saw he did indeed have something," Storrs said. "It's pretty robust, well-preserved, not flaking apart. That's a danger for these bones, when they dry out."
Storrs said he identified the bone by matching it to a partial skeleton of a mastodon already in the museum's collection. Its age is an educated guess based on knowledge of geology and geography - that was the time period during which meltwater from continental ice sheets scoured up sediment and entombed bones from many animals in this area.
Storrs said the museum, which is a federal repository for bones and fossils, receives numerous phone calls from people who think they've found ancient bones. Usually they turn out to be from a modern animal or are just an unusual rock formation, but about one every year or two turns out to be a significant find. Most are single bones that had been washed away by glacial runoff and encased in rock and dirt, then found when a cliff or stream bank erodes.
Boyers said he decided to give the bone to the museum because it would be preserved there in climate-controlled cabinets.
Storrs said the bone would broaden the museum's database of mastodon fossils, a public record that can be examined by the scientific community to learn more about the ancient mammals. For example, the bone could help increase the understanding of mastodon densities.
In the future, as technology becomes more sophisticated, it also theoretically could become part of a DNA database, Storrs said.
Boyers does not remember the exact day of his find but thinks it was in mid-May.
He and Plummer had decided to go on a canoe trip and had put into the river just off Hay Station Road in Pendleton County. They were 15 to 20 minutes into the trip when they stopped near some riffles to fish. He was wading in a shallow pool of water, surrounded by rock islands, when he saw the bone. It was covered with moss or lichen and was pretty soggy, and one end had broken off.
"I've been on that river since I was 5 or 6," Boyers said. "It's amazing that I'm now 37 and run across this."
