Ho Hum just another skull fragment and limb bone

It is getting rather routine to find skull fragments and great limb bones. So much so that I forget that whole animals used to be classified by one or two bones. I also forget that five years ago I'd die to have such a wonderful find of bones. I guess familiarity breeds contempt, and I've certainly become familiar with Bernie.

By my latest count, including skull fragments and brain cases, we have about 23 bones that are associated with heads! This is an incredible number of these important bones. Even the 'broken' bones are very interesting since the majority of the breaks are along suture lines of the skulls. This implies the bones were weathered and all flesh gone when they were buried, weathered to the point that the skull bones separated along the natural suture lines.

Here are the latest bones I have prepared; first the maxilla I talked about at my last post. This is the one with tooth abscesses.

 Next we have yet another skull fragment. It shows some nice suture separation.

Here is where it fits on the skull - looking from the bottom side. It sets midline, around the eyeball orbit.

Last, here's another limb bone. The end closest to the outside of the concretion was difficult to prepare as somehow it lost color contrast with the matrix and the structure didn't show up well. At first I wondered if it was a piece of coral. It did turn out to be a rather nice limb bone, with the normal incompletely ossified ends that we find from this group of animals.

Now back to preparing another batch of centrums (one with a nice neural arch) 

Sincerely, Greg Carr