Box of Bones Yields New Ice Age Species
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Researchers say a box of bones left at a Chicago museum a decade ago by a curious layman has turned out to contain the only known fossils of a dwarf water buffalo that roamed the Philippines in the last Ice Age.
“People bring in stuff all the time,” said Larry Heaney, a curator at the Field Museum.
“Most of the time, it turns out to be chicken or pork chop bone. This time it was of real scientific interest.” The new species, described in the Journal of Mammalogy, has been named Bubalus cebuensis, after the Philippine island of Cebu, where the bones were discovered by a mining engineer in 1958.
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