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Mystery skull sets tongues wagging

Scientists ask: what else is out there?

JOHN THOMPSON

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Did this skull found near Pangnirtung belong to a long-extinct species of sheep or deer, or just a particularly tiny caribou? No one will know, until researchers are able to inspect it first-hand. (PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE UQQURMIUT CENTRE FOR ARTS AND CRAFTS)

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Pangnirtung resident Andrew Dialla says he found the skull protruding from the frozen tundra during a walk near the shore with his daughter about a month ago.

The horned skull is about the size of a man’s fist. It resembles a baby caribou skull, except at that age, elders say caribou don’t have antlers.

Pictures of the skull have prompted residents to speculate whether the skull might belong to a long-extinct deer or sheep that inhabited the land millions of years ago, when the climate was much warmer.

Dialla is considering shipping the skull south to be examined by Dr. Richard Harrington, a distinguished retired paleontologist from the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa.

“I’m very curious about this,” said Harrington, who cautions that the skull could simply belong to a dwarf caribou.

But if the skull belongs to an extinct creature, he wouldn’t be surprised.

Harrington has spent over a decade helping to excavate an ancient beaver pond in Ellesmere Island in the High Arctic. That site, estimated to be four million years old, contained the remains of a now-extinct species of beaver, as well as vanished species of deer, horses, wolverines and bears.

Harrington said he won’t know if Dialla’s skull belongs to the Pliocene epoch, before the last ice age, until he examines it himself.

It looks like a baby caribou skull, but elders say caribou don’t have antlers until they’re older.

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This April, researchers announced another big discovery on Ellesmere Island – part fish and part alligator, which could be the first creature to crawl from the oceans on to shore, 375 million years ago.

But little similar research has been conducted in the southern Arctic, where Dialla’s mystery skull was unearthed, says Mary Ellen Thomas, manager of the Nunavut Research Institute.

Several years ago a fossilized stump of a tree did turn up near Pangnirtung, well above the tree-line, Thomas said.

She hopes the buzz surrounding the skull could lead to more r finds. “This will perhaps interest people in south Baffin. That’s good,” Thomas said.

Thomas and her colleagues field many phone calls from Nunavummiut who have spotted strange species of birds and insects such as wasps, previously unknown this far north.

Warm weather that researchers link to climate change continues to break records in the Arctic, encouraging new species to venture farther north and making these sights increasingly common.

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