Matt Dean and Jim Dines (IMAGE)

University of Southern California

Matt Dean and Jim Dines

Caption

The needles in the haystack: Matt Dean of USC (left) holds a box containing a dolphin skeleton and Jim Dines of NHM (right) holds up the pelvic bones. They searched through more than 10,000 boxes like this of unsorted cetacean bones for pelvic bones to study. Pelvic bones can be a hassle to collect and have long been thought to be vestigial, so often they're not collected with the rest of the skeleton. Dean and Dines found pelvic bones in only about two percent of the boxes of skeletons that they searched through.

Credit

USC Photo/Gus Ruelas

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