yeah so I went on a vacation with my family to [redacted] and it was super fun! it was a cabin out in the middle of nowhere surrounded by farms and hills. very pretty, 10/10 so anyway, I was walking around outside looking for my brother, but I found a vertebrae instead and decided that was good enough (see picture 1) I showed it to my sister and she and I started looking at different spines and vertebrae to try to figure out what it was. we eventually narrowed it down to ungulates coz it looked pretty similar to a sheep or a wild boar, but not quite. it had some pretty significant differences that didn't match perfectly so, I decided to peek outside to see if we could find more bones. after all, it would be strange if it was just a single vertebrae lying around lol guess what we found SO MUCH MORE it was INSANE I ended up finding a bunch more tiny pieces at first (see picture 2), including a few unidentifiable broken shards, a small rib, a few more vertebrae, and even parts of the upper and lower jaw. with the help one of my brothers standing on a sceptic tank and looking over the edge of a hill, I managed to climb down and retrieve a pelvis, huge chunk of spine, both humeruses and femurs, and even a part of the hoof (see picture 3) k this part gets gross stop reading if you're squeamish ":0 the pelvis and spine still had some bits of meat stuck to it. the spine still had the intervertebral discs in-between the vertebrae which was super cool to see bcs they're not purple or blue or smth like you see in the diagrams - it just looks like meat lol (ik that sounds stupid but I didn't realize haha). the pelvis and hoof also had some muscles and tendons on it and the hoof even had a little tuft of fur any guesses on what this would be now? (drumroll please) 'twas a deer! the upper and lower jaw were a dead giveaway with a distinctive curve and flat teeth for grinding leaves (see picture 7). finding the rest of the spine and the hoof also helped us figure it out. our initial search of vertebrae was unfortunately skewed because the first vertebrae we found was different than the others. if you look at most deer vertebrae, they have three "fins," but the first one we found didn't have the other two fins, which made things tough. (see picture 8) sadly we didn't find the rest of the skull :/ it probably rolled the rest of the way down the hill, and the hill was pretty steep and I didn't feel safe going down for fear of falling or not being able to get back up alas, I couldn't bring home the spine and pelvis because of the size and the remaining bits of meat, but I scrounged the first vertebrae I found as well as a rib and the upper jaw and I'm currently cleaning them :D they smell kinda bad :'0 if you find bones, make sure to clean them properly so you don't get sick :) there's lots of great tutorials online credits finding the bones // me & my brothers & sister identifying the bones // me & my sisters making the bones // deer, deer's mother cleaning the bones // various predators, scavengers, mother nature, and me bonus lizard // lizard music // Vsauce
