🔎 UNIDENTIFIED Found on beach in Pacific Northwest, USA. A vertebrate bone of a mammal?

[agatelover2016]

Found on a beach in Pacific Northwest. USA. A vertebrate bone it appears of a mammal? Having a hard time with this ID. Any help great appreciated !

 

[AU Seeker]

Is it still bone or has it fossilized, i.e. turned to stone?

 

[agatelover2016]

Is it still bone or has it fossilized, i.e. turned to stone?

Thanks for checking in ! Don't have in hand at moment (friends's piece), but did seem more light than something fossilized or something cast and filled? But not soft enough to think it was straight from a creature? If that makes sense?

 

[Almy]

I would expect a vertebrae bone to have a central hole for the nerve to go through. If it is a bone, the short length suggests compression loading like in a foot or ankle of a pretty large animal.

 

[Red-Coat]

Perhaps not a vertebra, but a pectoral fin bone (flipper) from a cetacean. Looks too big to be a dolphin (first pic) but could be from a small whale (second pic, which is a grey whale but there are a number of smaller species... plus juveniles of course).

 

[ConceptualizedNetherlandr]

Found on a beach in Pacific Northwest. USA. A vertebrate bone it appears of a mammal? Having a hard time with this ID. Any help great appreciated !

All mammals are vertebrates, ipso facto all their bones are vertebrate bones.

 

[Almy]

An individual bone in the backbone or vertebral column of a vertebrate animal is a vertebra (plural vertebrae). I should have used "vertebral" rather than "vertebrae" in my reply above. RC's use of "vertebra" for the single bone is correct. I'm glad to have been stimulated to look this up by the post and comments so I will use these terms correctly in the future (if I remember!).