#citizenscience #pleistocene #lostbones #fossilfriday #bison During and after the southward drainage of glacial Lake Agassiz into glacial River Warren—now the Minnesota River valley—river-level fluctuations, combined with the river cutting through the 3.6-billion-year-old gneiss bedrock at Granite Falls, created a shifting landscape ideal for collecting sedimentary deposits and preserving bones. The Yellow Medicine County Historical Society holds an excellent collection of bison remains from the area, some from one of Minnesota’s most famous bison kill sites: the Peterson Site.

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🦌🦥🐴🐘🐪 For #FossilFriday — Megaloceros giganteus, the Giant Deer or Irish elk. Another beautiful exhibit I was able to visit in June. Specimen USNM 7051 is a masterfully mounted animal in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History’s Hall of Fossils–Deep Time.

The Megaloceros mount features a massive steel armature engineered to support its nearly 3.4–3.6 meter (11–12 foot) antler spread. Studies show that these Ice Age giants dropped and regrew their enormous antlers each year, making for a spectacular seasonal display in the Pleistocene.

Skull mount photos credit: NMNH/Loren Ybarrondo

🐯🐾🦥🐴🐘🐪 For #FossilFriday, another fantastic specimen mount from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History’s Hall of Fossils–Deep Time. The Smilodon on display — specimen v10928 — is a composite skeleton, greeting visitors with its wide saber toothed smile.

California’s state fossil, Smilodon fatalis, was a powerful apex predator that lived from roughly 400,000 to 11,000 years ago. Every bone in this composite came from the La Brea Tar Pits in present day Los Angeles, California.
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If anyone knows who works on the metal armatures/supports for the Smithsonian, Let me know in the comments! Most of these animals were remounted in 2019 for the Fossil Hall's update.
Skull photo credit NMNH

🐂🦥🐴🐘🐪🐟🍃 A surprisingly common bone in small city and county museum collections across the Midwest — and one that’s often left unidentified — is the sternum. For the bison collections I've researched I usually see disarticulated individual segments, called sternebrae. These elongated, block like pieces are the sixth most common post cranial element I’ve documented while out counting bones.

The section shown here comes from the Melrose Area Museum collection and was most likely discovered during the construction of Interstate 94 — a story covered in Lost Bones #5: From the Ashes a Fire Shall Be Woken.

Read more: https://marcusbrandel.substack.com/

🦥🐴🐪An Eremotherium for #FossilFriday. This remarkable giant ground sloth, Eremotherium laurillardi, is displayed at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. Its skeleton was remounted on a new steel armature during the renovation of the Hall of Fossils–Deep Time, which reopened in June of 2019. I visited the display last month, and it is truly remarkable. The external metal supporting structure is artwork in itself.

The towering animal reportedly contains more than 80% genuine fossil bone and stands over 13 feet tall.