Buffalo skull - old or modern?

[JLBeach]

Since you all had such interesting and useful information on my non-shark tooth (darn it!) from yesterday, I thought I would throw this out to you to learn about it. My kids and I found this partial buffalo skull in the mud along a river bank here in Iowa. I love it SO much - such a great conversation piece! I would like to do a write up with some facts on it to place by the skull, but my expertise stops at anything past being one who gets excited about rocks and fossils! I was told that one way to determine age is to place a string between the tips of the horns, and to see how far off of the skull bump the string lies. When I do this, the string is on the skull bump. I do not know if there is any truth to this, or what it even means, but thought I would provide you with that visual if you need it. Please let me know if I can give you any further information or photos to help you in your assessment. Thank you everyone! 

[pcjr65]

Looks like an Urgal skull, but since it's probably not from Alagæsia, my only guess is that the creature would have been delicious. 

[JLBeach]

LOL - most likely so! Of course, now I need to look up what an 'Urgal' is . . . .

 

Just looked it up - yikes! 

 

[Ptychodus04]

It is probably pretty recent. Color can be deceiving but it looks pretty white. Most of the Pleistocene bone I have worked with is darker.

[goatinformationist]

The quick way to tell if it is fully petrified is to hold a lit match under the object; if it scorches or you smell burning hair it is not a true fossil.

[Uncle Siphuncle]

Compare horn core morphology closely with the various Bison species.  If it is Bison bison, which is my drive-by guess without scholarly scrutiny, consider it sub-fossil.  I have one like this in my house and it gets the same respect as if it were fossilized.

[tmaier]

Yeah, I don't really put a lot of weight behind if it is fossilized or not. The answer to the mystery is likely to be found back at that mud bank, and things that are found in context with this specimen. That is likely to reveal more clues of the age.

[Ptychodus04]

32 minutes ago, tmaier said:

Yeah, I don't really put a lot of weight behind if it is fossilized or not. The answer to the mystery is likely to be found back at that mud bank, and things that are found in context with this specimen. That is likely to reveal more clues of the age.


 

 

I guess you're right when considering late Pleistocene material.

[tmaier]

I would be very curious what else is in that mud bank. It might tell an interesting story. Specimens are always much more interesting when they are in context.

Was this specimen a "float" object that got washed in to the mud bank, and is the only item? Was it a whole skeleton in the bank, and maybe the skeleton has butcher marks on it, indictating who slaughtered it and when? Are there many bones at the turn of a stream that create a "bone bed", where streams like to collect and dump their debris? How did the bone get there? Washed down from upstream, or eroded from a layer in the bank? Is there is a bullet hole in on of the bones, a sign of the great buffalo slaughter of the 19th century? Maybe it isn't a paleontological object, maybe it is an intererting archeological object.

And this gets back to my repetious lecture of "Don't just run off with stuff from the field and expect to understand it, study the place it was found.".

[JLBeach]

Wise words, tmaier! There is an old NA camp site up the river a very short distance from where I found the skull, so I wonder if there is a connection? The river was very low when I found it.  To be honest, I was so darn excited, I completely did the whole "run off with stuff"move, but I will be more observant in the future! I have found quite a few mineralized buffalo teeth in the same area as the skull. 

 

Thank you for all of the info from everyone - I love learning from you!