Walking along the beach, we found a large piece of vertebrae. It was old and brown in color (washed up along the shore). Any way that we could tell what type of mammal it belonged to?

Need a picture for sure.

Post a pic dammit.

Feisty this morning, sorry :D

I would love to see a picture, but your best bet for identifying it is to email a picture to the Anthropology Department of your local university.

Yes, post a pic, or, take it to your local university biology lab.

Is the vertebral piece measurable? Is this a beach along fresh water or salt water?

Perhaps if you can dig around a little and find a skull, you’ll have a better idea. ;-p

I had something like this happen one time we had the creepy stories of our house being built on graves and that someone down the street dug a body up…

My dogs were in the yard digging and they were running around around with what appeared to be bones femur and a round bone size and shape of a hockey puck. I freaked. Ran in the house told my husband we reminisced about the “graveyard” story. My husband called our detective friend who came and got the bones and said he was sure they were not human. He sent them in for testing….cow and pig :/ lol

Hopefully you found some fish bones…if it’s human that would suck.

Gotta see a shot of this.

(Think of it as a Halloween gift for you.)

Here we go:

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It looks lit a deer or cow vertebra.

Not human.

Looks like a moderate sized animal that was swept to the sea. If it was anywhere near a river that flooded this year, it could be just about anything

I don’t think it is human. Now that I see this picture
I can make out the difference…but if it is human would be old I think.

I am gonna have to say it’s some kind of fish bone…?

Ahhh, theres nothing better than an archeological dig on the Internet on a Sunday afternoon YAH ME!

I don’t think it’s deer, since most deer vertebrae I’ve seen have a long piece coming off. But it’s pretty beaten up, so I could be wrong.

Doesn’t look human to me either—the spinal hole shape doesn’t look human.

To know FOR SURE…. yeah, go to a university lab. They won’t charge you money to identify it.

It’s not cow, human, or deer. My first thought was ungulate, but I’ve never seen that convex ridge in a spine.

Not shark either

We need our old friend @Darwin for this sort of thing. I miss her.