I was doing some gardening work today and came across this bone:
I believe it’s a vertebra but I can’t imagine what animal of that size could have been in my yard. We aren’t adjacent to any wilderness areas and this is a gated community. I imagine that a large enough deer could jump the boundary fence, but even then I don’t know what a deer would be doing on our street in the first place.
Just spitballing: could it be from a cow bone given to someone’s pet dog sometime in the past? Or maybe someone had a smoker and they roasted a big hunk 'o beef then had a backyard party?
Both of those theories depend on there being enough of a past history on your property to make them plausible suggestions.
Another vote for cow femur. When I was a kid my dog used to eat them. Not the meat; the bone. Here’s some pix, including with them sectioned like the OP’s bone fragment. cow femur - Google Search
I’m going to cut across the grain here and suggest that this is actually evidence of sasquatch, and furthermore a band of murderous sasquatch cannibals who have cut up the remains and buried them around in a distributed pattern which, if reconstructed, would provide a map toward the entrance to their underworld city deep within the Hollow Earth where their multidimensional zero point energy technology allows them to call upon eldritch beings to convey them across time and space to extragalactic civilizations.
Or, you know, a piece of cow femur buried by a neighborhood dog. Your pick on which theory appeals most to you.
That is definitely not vertebra which would look like this or this, and would not have sharp finished ends. That is definitely a femur that has been sectioned from a shank.
Like other people here have said, it’s most likely either the femur or the humerus of a cow, after it was sliced by the butcher. Most likely, someone gave it to a dog and that’s how it ended up in your yard.
