Suspected Patella from the North Sulfur River in Texas

[dannbethrfriends]

My daughter and I went hunting in the North Sulfur River near Dallas, Texas. She pulled this strange bean looking bone out and I had no clue what it could be. After lots of googling, it seems clear that it is a patella of some sort given the faces on the back. The closest looking thing I have found was a black bear patella for sale, though that specimen was significantly smaller than ours. I did run a "burn test" to check for extant collagen and didn't detect any burning smell. Any thoughts?

 

[JohnJ]

I think it looks like a patella, too.  It seems a bit narrow for mammoth, but definitely from a larger animal.

 

@Harry Pristis

@Brandy Cole

@fossilus@garyc

[fossilus]

Possibly camelid???  Maybe camelops sized?

[Harry Pristis]

I don't recognize the patella, but at ~3 inches, I'd start eliminating medium-large possibles.  The bone seems remarkably simple to be from a familiar land mammal.

 

 

[dannbethrfriends]

Thanks for the thoughts! We wandered around the local natural history museum and thought it looked an awful lot like a camelid on display as well! Maybe that's indeed the ticket. I'm sure etsy never gets an id wrong, but it does resemble a supposedly camelid patella on sale there too.

[JohnJ]

This is probably a good candidate for an identification request to Richard Hulbert.  He certainly has access to a large collection of comparative material.

 

@digit

[digit]

Indeed! Miocene-Pleistocene mammals are smack dab in the middle of Richard's wheelhouse. I'd consider sending Richard an email with a couple angles of the suspected patella with the ruler for scale. He's always busy and gets ~100 emails/day but now that the Montbrook field season has suspended for the summer he may have a bit more time to plow through his inbox. As here on the forum, a non-trivial percentage of the fossil ID requests he gets are in fact not fossil at all (he too sees an unending stream of Florida "dinosaur eggs"). I think he enjoys it when he actually gets images of a real fossil.

 

Contact info can be obtained here:

 

https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/museum-voices/richard-hulbert/

 

 

Cheers.

 

-Ken