We arrived yesterday in Ileret and the first thing we just had to do was to see if we could relocate finds located by our beta testers from the images we collected last season.
One of the pictures we placed online during the beta was flagged a few times as containing numerous fossil bone fragments. Here is the picture from the preview:
GPS in hand we drove out to area 8. After a few moments of figuring out the best way to use the gps data we had we found those fossil bones on the surface:
This is an excellent result and means that our method is working!
So, any clue what kind of bones these are?
The problem with these particular bone fragments is that they are mostly bits from the middle of the bone – it is the ends that tend to be useful for identification of an animal. It’s probably from some sort of bovid. Perhaps one of the experts can chime in to suggest something.
They clearly are fragments of the long bones; femur or humerus bones of a large animal. My guess is Hippopotamus or a large Bovid. It’s a little difficult without a scale though to do meaningful identification.
@Nzuve: Here’s a picture with a scale: https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/adrianevans/fossil-finder/talk/48/2720/
The fragments are between 5 and 10 cm long.
Excellent