While wating for things to begin trip to the desert in search for water I found this bone (above). I was a little dry run-off about a foot wide. I saw a rock in the middle of it and thought little of it. But Wait... Most rocks don't sit on their edge so I went back the 2-3 steps and oh, it's just a bone. The desert's full of them. But Wait... Most bones don's sit on their edge so I went back the 2-3 steps again and tried to wiggle it. It didn't wiggle. I gave it a little kick. It didn't move. How does a bone from a newly dead animal get stuck in the ground vertically???
I took a photo, marked the point with my GPS and pretty much forgot it. When I returned to may trailer, I told Mark a couple ho-hum things and he went back to his trailer. It wasn't until I was reviewing my photos that I remembered the bone, so I took a photo over to him. He immediately wanted to go out and see it.
Even knowing where it was, even having been there three hours earlier, the bone was incredibly hard to find. Mark took some measurements of what could be seen and some more photos and sent them to people he knows that are knowledgeable in such things. The (very) tentative identification is that its a sholder blade of a horse maybe ten thousand years old, but I have no idea and Mark isn't positive. We are waiting to hear back from the experts.
The bottom photo is Mark taking care of some last minute details. You can see the kind of landscape where it is (we didn't move it).
Finding Pliestocene mammals and digging around in a cave where people lived 14,000+ years ago -- This ain't Corvallis!
