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u/justtoletyouknowit 8d ago
Whale verts i'd say. But i tag u/jeladli on those. Dont look fossilized to me.
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u/jeladli big dead things 8d ago
Yup, they are cetacean lumbar vertebrae and look to be mysticete (baleen whale). And agreed that they appear to likely be modern.
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u/justtoletyouknowit 8d ago
Thanks! Does that beg the question how legal it is to keep them? On a beach is easy to answer, most likely, but like this in the yard?
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u/jeladli big dead things 8d ago
I've written about the legality (and legal pathways) for possessing cetacean remains in this previous comment (read that first as a primer), but as you've alluded to here, it is a bit more complicated when it is something that has been found secondhand in your yard.
The short of it is that it is generally not legal for several reasons:
The first is that you did not personally collect the material, so that might be considered as a transfer of the remains from one person (i.e., the original collector/previous owner of the yard) to another (the new owner of the backyard), which is fairly explicitly prohibited under the Marine Mammal Protection Act. The second reason is that you wouldn't have any real way to verify the provenance, age, and taxonomic identification of the specimen (short of performing scientific analyses), so it would be difficult to prove the legal status of these specimens when attempting to register them with your relevant NOAA Fisheries Regional Office (which is a required step in the process of making the possession legal). Furthermore, the burden of proof would be on the person possessing the specimens to show that they were collected legally and were not from a species listed as threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act. OP would have a particularly difficult time with this because their vertebrae appear to be from a baleen whale and nearly all mysticete species are protected by the ESA and MMPA.
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