Officials found the fossil of a giant dinosaur jawbone while investigating a suspicious package on a bus in the mountains of Peru on Tuesday.
The fossil, weighing some 19 pounds, was found in the cargo hold of the bus, which was headed for the capital of Lima, and had been sent on the bus company's package service.
"They began to check the package because it didn't have anything to indicate what was inside. They were worried about its weight, opened it and found the fossil," said Kleber Jimenez, a local police officer.
Peru has struggled for years to combat trafficking of fossils and artifacts. Recently Yale University in the United States agreed to return thousands of pieces taken from the ancient Inca citadel of Machu Picchu to Peru.
"The jawbone that was found could be from a triceratops, even though dinosaurs like that have never been found in southern Peru," Pablo de la Vera Cruz, an archeologist at the National University in Arequipa in southern Peru, said after examining police photos.
Okay, guys. This that a ceratopsian jaw? It looks more like a mammal jaw. Maybe a proboscidean?
5 comments:
It's an elephant, yeah.
Per Laelaps, you're right.
Synapsid, sauropsid--practically the same thing, you know.
Close enough for government work!
A bit more seiously, how many SoAm proboscideans have there been?
Proboscidian, likely mastodon based on the tooth shape. Mammoths and elephants are more crenulated and squiggly.
Appears to be an old mastodon based on the tooth wear.
Yeah, that is not a dinosaur jaw. That jaw actually belongs to a extint mastodon species, which are commonly found in southern Peru. I think it was a local archeologist(!) who claimed it was a dinosaour jaw...yeah buddy, you go back to your pre-columbian site to keep finding mummies and the alike ad leave the palaeontological stuff to real palaentologists. If the Peruvian government actually bothered in funding some palaeontological studies this kind of mistakes wouldn't be making it into the news. Shame.
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