Wednesday, September 12, 2007

Some people have all the luck

I'll have to tell The Man to look more closely at debris sticking out from the river banks as he boats upriver today and in the future, as he might just be staring at bones of an ice age animal and not simply old branches or tree roots.

As reported by CBC news, a man had an astounding find at a location about 100 km from our home as he was walking along a riverbank and found bones (including a skull), skin and even guts protruding from the permafrost. A paleontologist is going to have a look at the remains and the location the animal was found and suspects that the find is likely a steppe bison–the same animals represented in Paleolithic paintings on the cave walls at Lascaux and more commonly unearthed west of our region in what was once Eastern Beringia. (Follow the link above to Lascaux for wonderful photos of the paintings. Eg. Look in the Main Gallery for paintings such as the Back to Back Bison or in the area of The Shaft of the Deadman for a depiction of a speared bison fatally wounding a man.)

To the right is an image from a museum exhibit of a specimen recovered in Alaska.
Living here just gets better and better!

1 comment:

Steph said...

Amazing!! I love this kind of stuff.

I've also been keeping an eye out for news about the mammoth DNA that was partially decoded a couple years ago. I wonder if we may end up with a cloned mammoth one of these days!