2019_08_03_cemetery-bones_14 - a photo on Flickriver

2019_08_03_cemetery-bones_14

These are bones exhumed by burrowing animals at a cemetery in Michigan where my sister and I went to visit the graves of relatives.

The cemetery, which I'll leave un-named, is sited on moraine dumped by at the edge the vast glacial ice cap, which also left the Great Lakes, in a long pause in its retreat, completed only about 10,000 years ago. That moraine is mostly sand, meaning it's easy both for planting remains, and for digging them up as well. (A geology map calls the cemetery's hills "glacial outwash sand and gravel.")

The graves from which bones were tossed, outside holes in the ground, were all either unmarked or hard to guess. There was a fair amount of natural slumping of soils on the cemetery's hills, due partly to the hills' geologic youth, and partly to burrowing animal activity—no doubt taking advantage of underground cavities in the hill's graves, most of which were dug and planted prior to the current convention of putting caskets in concrete vaults.

Most of the bones I saw were obviously ribs. I couldn't tell what the others were, but perhaps some readers will know. The graves in these parts of the cemetery were all from the mid to late 1800s. The bones were likely well preserved by the nature of the soil, which is typically alkaline with young glacial moraine.

I later shared some of these photos with the cemetery office, which was glad to hear from me, and said they would quickly re-inter the remains. They also said the likely burrowers were foxes. (This link and others like it confirm the suspicion.) All the holes, typical of fox dens, were on the slopes of the cemetery's hills, rather than at the tops of bottoms. Note the skull between two human ribs. I checked and it's definitely from a fox.

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Taken on: August 3, 2019

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2019_08_03

cemetery

geology

bones

ribs

exhumed

foxes

fox

fox burrow

burrow

fox den

fox dens

fox hole

Michigan

Wisconsin glaciation

glacier

outwash

soil

sand

dig

diggings

forensics

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Sets appears in: • 2019_08_03 Exhumed bones in a Michigan cemetery

Camera: Canon EOS 5D Mark III, f/9.0, 1/500 sec, 105mm, ISO 100 (more info) (hide info)

Camera:	Canon EOS 5D Mark III
Aperture:	f/9.0
Exposure Time:	0.002 sec (1/500)
Focal Length:	105mm
ISO:	100
Exposure Bias:	0 EV
Flash:	Off, Did not fire
Exposure Program:	Program AE
Exposure Mode:	Auto
Metering Mode:	Spot
White Balance:	Auto
Color Space:	sRGB
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