I found this bone-like thing several years ago along a road on Hilton Head Island. Can anyone tell me what it is?
Stingray.
Yep, that what killed “croc hunter” Steve Irwin.
That was fast! Thanks Munch, I was thinking that it must have been something along those lines but stingray never crossed my mind.
It was a lucky guess. I thought it’d be a stingray, did a quick search on “stingray tail bone” and got tons of pictures like yours. How far off the beach was that road? Bet that threw you off the trail.
Is that the stinger? At the aquatic park they said they clipped the stingers off, which kept growing back, so I thought they were like fingernail, not bone.
It was found more than a mile from the beach, but maybe 400 yards from the bay. That did throw me off.
Neither nail nor bone, it is essentially a modified scale. The teeth, scales and stingers of sharks and rays are all basically the same organ type. And just as the teeth of sharks and rays keep getting replaced as they break off, so do the scales and stingers.
And while we’ve lost the scales and stingers of our fishy ancestors, we have retained the same type of teeth, so in mammalian terms that stinger is most similar to our teeth.