Camels in Canada

A research team headed up by the Canadian Museum of Nature have discovered fossil fragments from the leg of what appears to be a camel (or at least a close relative) - a camel that lived over 3 million years ago.

It always amazes me how experts in paleontology are able to determine the species of an animal - even a long extinct animal - from mere fragments of bone.

So how did they do it in this case? You can find a lot of summary detail here, or you can peruse the research paper here; I'll try and give a couple of examples from these sources showing how they managed to figure this out.

First of all, the size and physical characteristics of the bone indicated that it belonged to a large cloven-hooved mammal, and dating the bone placed it at a time in North America when camels were the largest of that family. I didn't realize until now that camels actually originated in North America, however this is the first time evidence of them has been found so far North.

The neatest technique used was collagen typing.
From the paper: "Type I collagen, the dominant protein in bone which is shown to survive longer than other genetically informative biomolecules²³, is sufficiently variable between mammal genera to be useful taxonomically."

In the following image, produced by mass spectrophotometry, the fossil of interest is the Ellesmere fossil, names for the island on which it was found. The Dromedary is an Arabian camel, the Bactrian camel is found in central Asia:

Honestly it is above my head, but I can appreciate that many of the numbers on the m/z scale (mass range) are nearly identical.

Anyway, I'll leave it there before I have an aneurysm