Well, this is long overdue.

A while back, I posted an image on the blog of a few skeletal elements that had been found in the backyard of some friends of mine, and posed a challenge to my readers to try and identify them. About a month has passed, and they are still sitting out on the deck, uncleaned, judging me every day as I walk past them to go work on other things. But I do think it's about time that I get around to talking about them a bit more, describing the process I went through in identifying them, and telling you what animal I believe they came from.

The three bones in question, properly identified by Scott Elyard as a pelvis (top, in left lateral view), femur (bottom left, in anterior view), and tibia (bottom right, in anterior view), all from the left side of the animal.

Fossils, the Beagle, and Backyard Osteology

Yesterday, Superoceras kicked off Darwin Week with a fantastic guest post from Dr. Tom Holtz on what everyone should know about paleontology. I think he did a wonderful job of sewing together the threads of Earth, Life, and Time to show why the study of fossils is not only relevant to learning about our collective past, but is important for emphasizing our common future as well. The importance of fossils was not lost on Darwin, and while most people tend to associate him and his theory with places like the Galápagos Islands, and animals like finches, during his voyage on the HMS Beagle, he was also quite the fossil collector. While traveling South America, Darwin collected fossils of many extinct mammals that would later go on to be described by Sir Richard Owen including Toxodon platensis, Macrauchenia patagonica, Mylodon darwini, Equus curdivens, Glossotherium sp., and Scelidotherium leptocephalum (Fernicola et al. 2009). Darwin, a man who was very good at connecting the dots, used his understanding of geology and natural history to identify these organisms as having had existed at some time in the past, and having gone extinct. This was one of the many observations he used when formulating his theory of evolution by natural selection.