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DL's Link
Quite a find. What a stud of a bull.
Wow thats incredible. Amazing how well the bone structure of this animal is preserved. I would think that under water and mud for over 100 yrs it would look much more weathered and broken down than it does.
Wow, look at those crowns.
why are the horns cut at the bases like that ? looks more like a HI Fence elk got free !!
Skull probably broke apart along the suture lines due to the long period underwater.
Very cool to find one that old with the antlers so well preserved.
Here's the carbon dating results, “There’s a 97.5 percent chance that it’s 1850 or older, which would put firmly into the range of the extinct Eastern elk,” said Lou Bender, a researcher at New Mexico State University.
cityhunter, those arent cuts, the skull separated at the joints, (as sticksender said) if you look at an elk, whitetail, or other cervid skull, you can see the joints as squiggly lines, exactly in the locations where the pictured skull portions (with antlers)are separated
DL,
What a gorgeous set of antlers. Were they found in an old attic somewhere? They are in great shape....no rodent gnawing, significant chemical staining (maybe a little yellowing, but given the age, that is to be expected), or anything!! Assuming the young lady is your daughter, she seems to enjoy the playful pose with antlers on her head too.....that is a photo for the family album.....(edit: My bad, I missed the link...my questions were answered in it)
That rack really reminds me of a Roosevelt Elk or a red stag, because of the crown.
He found the whole skeleton in a lake.buried in mud.
Amazing!!
That explains the absence of rodent gnawing......I would have expected more "staining".....great find!!
The article says they were fishing and they saw something sticking out of the mud. Sounds like they actually saw part of the vertebra first.
The eastern elk often had bifurcated 4ths. Some of the transplanted elk into New Zealand a long time ago were likely from a game park that had an eatern elk lineage. Some of the New Zealand bulls still show bifurcated 4ths.
IMO, some New Zealand bulls with those features should be captured and re-transplanted back into the Eastern USA. In New Zealand, they are considered pests and this lineage is arguably endangered.
the fish snaggers occasionally drag one up from the muck in the missouri river where I live near St. Louis.
I found a petrified shed antler from an Eastern Elk in Northwest Indiana several years ago. I was walking in a ditch that had been straightened by going through an old peat bog. The shed was old enough that native Americans had broken off all the tines and the main beam to get what tools they could use from it. There was no animal knowing at all. The bases of all the tines were splintered. I lived in Lake County which is the most Northwestern county in the state.
That's a great find and an interesting project to determine the age.
Jim
Amazing find.... Yeah, cloning would be cool to try to recover the an extinct species. A real Jurassic Park...
I agree with David A on this, red stag in eastern US. If we could just get the wolf lovers to fall in love with the stag.
