So I’m sitting outside on my patio on New Years Day (it’s sunny! and warm! and I have an old friend visiting, so it’s very pleasant!) when I look down on the concrete and see this little guy:
I think it’s a rat bone, perhaps a tibia, but the web is coming up empty on close up images. It’s too big to be a mouse, I think, but still pretty tiny (it’s not a smilodon bone, for example). Here it is with a ruler:
It’s about 2.4 centimeters long, and gently curved. One end is clearly a hinge joint, and the other splays out a bit, but still looks like a hinge joint.
OK, bioBABloggees. Any ideas? We’ve seen rats in our area before (they’re cute!), but no rabbits, and only rarely any squirrels. Could it be from a bird? An alien? An angel? Whaddya think?
January 2nd, 2007 at 12:40 am
It’s probably a “boner”: http://www.superdickery.com/seduction/3.html
January 2nd, 2007 at 1:14 am
Do you have any owls in your neighborhood? That bone is so clean it must have come from an owl pellet. That’s bigger than most owl food, but the great horned is indigenous around your area (we have one that visits the tree behind our house occasionally). It’s also free of any teeth or gnaw marks.
My guess (and it’s purely a guess) is that you are probably correct in that it’s a mammal. How about a vole?
- Jack
January 2nd, 2007 at 1:45 am
Looks like a humerus to me. Way too small for a rabbit, and probably too small for a squirrel. A shame my bone collection is boxed up miles away…
January 2nd, 2007 at 1:59 am
I am in no way qualified to analyze this, but I did find a rat bone here:
http://home.pacifier.com/~neawanna/SNOW/unk20051212-2-3_comp.jpg
context: http://home.pacifier.com/~neawanna/SNOW/SNOW_pellets.html
This one is about 35mm=1.4 inches, for a black rat; your specimin is an inch larger.
January 2nd, 2007 at 2:13 am
Egads… my mistake. Your ruler was in cm. So this is consistent with a small rat maybe?
January 2nd, 2007 at 2:52 am
maybe the bone of a sparrow? or a piegeon?
January 2nd, 2007 at 3:00 am
My wife is a medical scientist, aka a person who cuts up cute, furry white animals.
Works for a mob called he Bone Growth Foundation.
Her opinion is “young rat tibia”, although she’d really like to see the fibula extension
to be sure, e.g. the pointy bit of bone where teh fibula joins the tibia.
January 2nd, 2007 at 6:33 am
Rats may look “cute”, but they are not! They are destructive and carry nasty diseases. They also infest areas.
We had roof rats in our attic last year. They leave feces (and invisible trails of urine) everywhere they roam and they eat food left out (including pet food.) We found a drawer they had nested in that was very nasty underneath.
Pest control specialist recommend using strong chemicals and gloves to clean up after rats. Rat bites can make you very sick and small children have died from them.
So please, do not label them as “cute”. That label, in particular, causes other people to see something lovable that is decidedly not.
January 2nd, 2007 at 6:41 am
It looks human to me. That’s kind of gross. I wouldn’t pick up stuff like that.
January 2nd, 2007 at 6:43 am
Maybe it is a chicken bone from somebody’s lunch.
January 2nd, 2007 at 6:56 am
“Maybe it is a chicken bone from somebody’s lunch. ”
That’s what I was going to say! Chicken wing that some critter picked out of the trash. Maybe he left it there to give you a hint – “Next time throw out a side of bleu cheese dressing, too.”
January 2nd, 2007 at 8:30 am
My first guess was also that it is a chicken bone, but then I saw the ruler and dismissed that possibility since chickens usually don’t come in that size…:)
It’s interesting what kinds of animals come and go to our backyards when we’re not paying attention…
January 2nd, 2007 at 8:35 am
Comments were turned off when I tried to comment here yesterday. I was somehow able to put a small comment in the previous post. Go figure.
My comparative anatomy texts are still boxed up from several moves back, but this bone appears to be more avian than mammalian to me. The bit that bothers me is that if this is a lower leg bone of a rat, then we should be seeing the fibula stick out for part of the length or we would see where it had broken off. There are too many extra condyles (knobby bits) for it to be from a forelimb. The link below should show a pretty decent rat skeleton.
http://www.carolina.com/owls/guide/ratskeleton.pdf
I think what the BA has found is the tarsometatarsus of a bird. That would be an extended tarsus (think lower, lower leg). Check out the link below for a pigeon’s skeleton, which should serve as a pretty good generic bird for our purposes.
http://www.carolina.com/owls/guide/birdskeleton.pdf
This is my take on things, but vertebrates aren’t my speciality — I’m an Invertebratista. Are there any bird people reading this who can confirm or deny my guess?
January 2nd, 2007 at 9:03 am
I’m going to have to go with a chicken wing bone on this one. Growing up in NYC, you would often find someone’s left over lunch laying around the street, although I’ve never seen it picked so clean before. But I guess if a critter got a hold of it…
I’ll have to conduct a scientific study and order some wings for dinner tonight.
January 2nd, 2007 at 9:08 am
Maybe the BA is fibbing to us all, to test our gullibility. Maybe that’s an inch scale after all (with architect’s 1/10-scale sub-increments, instead of 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, and so on). Yeah; he’s a bone-fibber!
January 2nd, 2007 at 9:30 am
I believe what you have there is the humerus of a common pigeon.
http://faculty.uca.edu/~march/bio2/birdskel.gif
http://www.geocities.com/dragonraid/birds/pp/images/misc/passengerpigeonskeleton.jpg
http://www.backyardnature.net/birdbone.gif
What did I win?
January 2nd, 2007 at 9:35 am
I’m inclined to say avian coracoid, which is hard to find adequately illustrated on the web (like rats) but this page seems to have both the best photo and the best anatomical illustration: http://tinyurl.com/yx2sc9
Rough guess, from the size, would be medium-small bird, from jay to pigeon size, but they vary in size and shape so matching to an exact species might be tough. I agree with Jack Hagerty – being this clean is suspect. Possibly a cornish hen from someone’s trash. I’d think you’d have to cook or boil it to get it that clean.
If it is a coracoid, this is more on-topic than you might have suspected – the development of the coracoid is one of those details in the evolution of dinosaurs into birds that paleontologists pay attention to, it would appear.
Good luck! I know you’ll keep us posted
January 2nd, 2007 at 10:12 am
Barber: Rats may not be “cute” but they are an essential part of our ecosystem, recycling all kinds of waste. As scavengers they are of course, prone to collecting nasty bacteria. Whos fault is that? We’re the ones that leave stuff sitting around for them to eat. They are also really smart, considering the size of their brains. I once saw a wharf rat(at a gas plant in Saudi Arabia) sitting on a table eating a sandwich. It was freaking hugh, big enough to hold the sandwich in its paws as would a human, though sitting down it was only about 16 inches tall. I didn’t want to start an argument, so I just backed away, while it watched me with its beady eyes and continued eating. Where’s a rattlesnake when you need one?
Working at a state park as I do, I see people come unglued whenever they’re faced with something icky, such as snakes, throwing rocks, etc. The snake does an excellant job eating rats, mice and squirrels(cute rodents with furry tails).
I like cats for that very reason. When allowed to perform their ecological function, they are really efficient at clearing the local neighborhood of “undesirables” like rats. Cool little killers, are cats. I’ve watched mine play before killing rats and it finally dawned on me WHY cats do that,,,it’s to ensure the rats are healthy enough to be eaten. If the rat doesn’t try hard enough to escape, there’s probably something wrong with it, so the cat won’t eat the kill, just leaves it lying there, dead. Cats are better than any trap and non toxic, like the blood thinners used to poison rats today. Plus, they clean up after themselves,,,
Get a cat!
Gary 7
January 2nd, 2007 at 10:46 am
you don’t have any voodoo priestesses nearby, do you?
; ^)
i’d guess avian/rodent specie, too…it is very clean [too?], though….
January 2nd, 2007 at 1:37 pm
I’d vote bird. My neighbors had a bird feeder for a while several years ago, and they filled it with sunflower seeds. The birds, for some reason, would pick up a seed and fly to the wire over my yard to eat. Sometimes the seeds fell onto my back lawn.
In the spring, I had a diagonal line on sunflowers across my back lawn. Some were HUGE! Very pretty.
I tried to pass it off as an alien message from space, but no one bought it.
January 2nd, 2007 at 2:06 pm
“Rats may look ‘cute’, but they are not! They are destructive and carry nasty diseases. They also infest areas.”
Humans are destructive, carry nasty diseases, and infest large areas, but I still think we’re pretty cute.
January 2nd, 2007 at 2:22 pm
It is clearly a Leprechaun. Did you find a pot of gold nearby?
January 2nd, 2007 at 2:40 pm
It’s almost certainly a bird bone. My first guess would be a humerus, but it could be a coracoid bone as well, see:
http://www.worldbook.com/features/birds/assets/skeleton.gif
I’m leaning towards the former because the distal end (the elbow) looks very distinct and similar in both birds and mammals. (The distal end is the one over the 6 in the ruler photo).
Next time you have chicken, try a comparison! The chicken bones would be bigger, but similar in shape.
I’m quite sure that it is not a tibia, it looks wrong, and in many birds and small mammals the tibia and fibula are fused together as one bone, which is not the case here.
January 2nd, 2007 at 4:41 pm
“It’s almost certainly a bird bone.”
Maybe that coyote finally got the Road Runner.
January 2nd, 2007 at 6:37 pm
Dat is not a bone. It is just a message from some soyten mutual friend what tinks you might oughta do da right ting and you knows what dat is. Have a nice day.
January 2nd, 2007 at 6:38 pm
January 2nd, 2007 at 6:56 pm
Clearly it is the bone of an underpant gnome!
It’s amazing how the perception of something can change depending on visual references available – my first thought was that it was a human bone.
January 2nd, 2007 at 7:00 pm
Rats are totally cute. I don’t know where you get off telling people to lie. They also make great pets.
You’re right that wild rats are pests, can cause property damage, and are potentially dangerous. So are raccoons, feral cats, skunks, prairie dogs, and (as noted) humans. That has no bearing on their physical cuteness.
January 3rd, 2007 at 11:16 am
Well – someone has to say it.
It’s a bug.
January 3rd, 2007 at 2:51 pm
Well, being a former (way former) Comparative Anatomy Lab TA, I had it pegged as a humerous. But wasn’t at all sure about the critter make. So, I checked in with my Comparative Anatomy professor of 30 years ago – no one knows bones better than he does. Anyhoo, he stated that it was a “tweety” humerous. The tweety would be bigger than a dove and smaller than an eagle.
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