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Check out this Shed!!! I once had a Caribou in my yard...

AIRASSAULT

AIRASSAULT

PMA Member
.........10,000 years ago, and here's the proof. Thought some of you might find this interesting. I was a little over 1 year old when back in July of 1985, my uncle, Mike, stumbled across what he thought was a strange looking "stick" protruding through a wash-out composed of blue-clay. He started to dig around it with his pocket knife and soon noticed that it was a piece of bone. He called my dad and the two of them excavated a Caribou Shed Antler. Mike didn't really know what to do with it, so, he took it to one of his professors at the time at Muscatine Community College. They then pointed him in the direction of a Paleontologist, Dr. Holmes Semken, at the University of Iowa. He ended up donating it to the University and it now resides in the Repository in the Geology building. I had known about this antler for a long time, and since I'm a full time student at the U of Iowa, I decided I would try to see if I could find someone to talk to about getting to see the antler for myself. Today, I finally was able to make contact with a lady in charge of the Repository and she pulled out the antler and let me take some photos of it. Sorry, no ATL's. The pics are kindof blurry because I only had my cell phone to take them with. I still live on our family farm where this was found. What do you think would be the odds of matching it up with the other side?:grin:.... Some dang pre-historic squirrel probably ate it up already!

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The Card reads: Name: Caribou Antler / Mike Scott, Wilton, Iowa 7/85
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Pretty cool Billy!

that thing probably used to eat grass out of my old yard.... WAY before it was my yard
;)
:D
 
Very cool, never would've thought of caribou here. I love running trotlines & digging up fossilized antlers & buffalo horns out of river banks.
 
That is great! I am sure the glaciers forced them south during the last ice age. That is an awesom find.
 
Dewy said:
That is great! I am sure the glaciers forced them south during the last ice age. That is an awesom find.
Click to expand...


That's what I was thinking at first... It made sense to me because it is kind of in a valley where maybe a glacier went through. I asked the lady in-charge of the repository how she thought it got there and she said they were actually native to our area along with mastadons and what not.
A couple things I forgot to add too was that it's the largest and most complete antler found in Iowa of that age especially for being burried in a clay. I also talked to my uncle about it some more last night and he said he actually found the top of the antler first and couldn't find the other half until about a month later after another rain.. He said it was back into the wash-out a little further.. They were about 6 ft deep he said.
 
[and she said they were actually native to our area along with mastadons and what not.]

Absolutely! caribou, mastadons, mammoths, giant ground sloths, wolly rhinos, cheetahs, saber-tooths, etc. were all native up there during the late Pleistocene and early Holocene. There were lots of cool, crazy animals native to that area. We've had several mammoth skeletons found down in southern Arizona. Several years ago, I got to witness the excavation of a mammoth tusk down near the San Pedro River on Fort Huachuca. Great find on that antler!!
 
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