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Thursday, 21 April 2011

Not a mammoth

As a follow-up to Carl's post of Norrie and his "mammoth tusk". There were actually two of them and indeed they weren't tusks of any kind but, much more mundanely I fear, they were horns. And just as mundanely, they weren't "buried deep in the peat", but were found, in March 1999, when a ditch was being cleaned out close to the Machrie Hotel! A possible suggestion is that they were once mounted and displayed in the hotel (or in the original farmhouse which became the hotel) and then thrown out perhaps on some change of ownership. They were taken to the National Museum in Edinburgh and identified as some kind of Indian/Asian cattle. They are presumably still there. Here are a couple of very poor photographs of the two of them after they had been washed. The tape measure is extended to approx. 3 feet (90 cm).
Malcolm
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2 comments:

  1. Anonymous21 April 2011 at 08:18

    :-)
    I still think Norrie's story is the best.... And they still look like pachyderm tusks. Indeed why are the photos so blurry? The whole Indian horn whole thing sounds like a mammoth conspiracy to me....
    Carl

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  2. Islay Natural History Trust21 April 2011 at 09:00

    Ho, ho! You're clearly on the horns of a dilemma between a good story and the mundane truth :-)

    The photographs are blurry because they were originally taken on a Polaroid camera, and those photographs were then themselves photographed by a film camera and then finally converted to digital. You'd be blurry after going through all that :-)
    Malcolm

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