Mysterious Remains at the Bottom of the Bone Pit

Does anyone know what kind of vertebrae this is?

IMG_6953, originally uploaded by Mic2006.

Shortly after descending the bone pit Greg found two beaver skulls in a corner and as I was walking I kicked something that made an oddly porcelean sound - very unlike the sound of the rock shards beneath my feet.

In examining the cave floor I found this broad plate-like piece of what I think was bone - a vertebrae fused to the inside of it. The plate was far thinner than the other bones and appeared to be partly stone in places or maybe it was just scaled over with flowstone.

Some possibilities that came to mind - it is certainly from something larger than a beaver and with a thinner skull - someone suggested a deer ??? I will show the picture to my chiropractor this wednesday and see if the vertebrae look human. They have a model in the office that shows the lower lumbar - where my problem lies with all the nerves coming out. If it were human, might this be a burial site - or more likely just some unfortunate who had fallen down the shaft in the forest.

(Just been checking out pictures on “google images” of human vertebrae - never realized how different they all are and also I am not seeing the hole at the center of the vertebrae like you would see in a human - also wonder about the angle of attachment looks like the skull would be pretty flat on top.)

I recall the bones - like water-logged slabs of wood - that we had pulled up from a sinkhole north of Orangeville. Buried deep in the glacially deposited clay and agregates we had exposed them with a sucking dredge and they turned out to be what was left of many ice-age caribou. I suppose a shaft that bells out at the bottom is a natural trap and anything that falls down there is unable to climb out. Fascinating! The debris is really deep on the floor - it would be an amazing place for an archaeologist to dig.