I've received the following images from Sue Michelsen-Heath, Curator - Natural and Interactive Sciences, Otago Museum, Dunedin, New Zealand, to identify, but I cannot.

I would definitely call them vertebrate of some description (rather than the skeletal remains of a gorgonian, particularly Keratoisis sp. (Family Isididae)), but vertebrate skeletal morphology is past me.

Is anyone online able to shed any light on this thing?

Ta
Me

.... and one final

They look amphicelous to me, but I can forward the pictures to a fish person I know. I assume they were washed up on a beach somewhere in NZ?

Dan

There is no place to stick a skull, pelvis or tail! :shock:

Maybe whale phalanges??????? (too many bones and the ends are all wrong):bugout:

Very mysterious.

It's not Sir Um... is it ???

I am probably way off base, but Leatherback Sea Turtle???

It's not Sir Um... is it ???

..... or the remains of WK's finger?

Funny you should suggest turtle, cuttlegirl, as Matt has pm'd me the same thing.

That sounds like a really good guess. Check out: http://courses.science.fau.edu/~jwyneken/sta/
for an extremely detailed account of sea turtle anatomy.

Under the skeletal anatomy there are pictures of the vertebrae and I don't think they really match the pictures Steve posted, unfortunately. The vertebrae look much more complicated, more like our own. I couldn't find any pictures of nerves coming out of a turtle spinal cord, to possibly explain what the big tubes coming out of the bones in the pictures were. Hmmm...very interesting. Do we know whether it just washed ashore or was dragged up in a trawl?

Cheers!

EDIT:

I was a little unsure about what I posted above as the previous website never explicitly stated which part the cervical vertebrae were (since the pictures included an atlas vertebrae I figured it was just the whole backbone, which in retrospect was silly as it only had 7 bones in it which wouldn't really be enough. Interesting factoid: humans and giraffe, and I guess sea turtles as well now, all have the same number of bones in their neck, 7!).
Here: http://tofino.ex.ac.uk/euroturtle/bones/skel.htm has an overall break down of the skeletal system. Though it is simple, it shows that the cervial vertebrae go from the head to the shell. While the vertebrae passes under the shell, it looks like the bone structure becomes very different. Coming out of the shell, it again turns more complicated to form the caudal vertebrae (I think). Pictures of the caudal vertebrae can be seen in the first link.

So I take back what I have said, this could be the vertebrae from underneith the shell of a sea turtle. Now the question is, can the vertebrae become detached from the shell without coming apart? Very fascinating!

I just heard back from my friend at Stony Brook. Her and her prof both say its a mammalian sternum. On the right-hand side is the manubrium with attachment points on the sides for the clavicles The curlies are the cartilagenous remains of the ribs. No clue what mammal.

Dan

It's the sternum of a subadult NZ fur seal

I'm glad you didn't post an hour ago :)

Dan

It's the sternum of a subadult NZ fur seal


That makes more sense than turtle remains, especially at that latitude.

I knew I'd seen that somewhere! But couldn't for the life of me remember where (or what it was for that matter!). We have a disarticulated fur seal skeleton in the teaching lab!!!!! :oops:


J

Here's another one. The maximum dimension of the bone is 87mm; it's been trawled from rather shallow depth (<40 metres) from an area where we do not have any old sediments (so it has to be Recent) - from the Hauraki Gulf, Auckland. Anyone make a guess (I'm hopeless when it comes to things with bones).

Here's my highly uneducated guess. Dolphin cervical
vertebra...

Nice to see how fast information can spread around: http://www.otagomuseum.govt.nz/news_129.html

New Zealand is a small and friendly country; we don't need phones you know - we just holler at each other, from one end of the country to the next.

I like the dolphin cervical vertebra theory; anyone else want to debate? (I remember (http://www.tonmo.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1998&page=3&highlight=parrot+fish) (unfortunately all images are lost .... though I can probably re-embed at a later point in time) a great discussion we had regarding one odd thing - a turtle beak/parrot fish beak that proved to be some mammal hoof - and the camp was split down the middle)

Why didn't they answer the chameleon question? (Although I would say I'm more interested in what happens if you stick a CEPH in a mirror-sided box, I think I already know-threat/display patterns of some sort.)