According to a Daily Mail article released yesterday, a 19 lb. jawbone from an extinct elephant relative was found in an unmarked package in a bus compartment. There isn't much else to the story, except that the mandible was misidentified by the "expert" called to look at photos of the fossil (and hence the error was repeated in the newspaper). According to the report, the jaws were from a Triceratops;
Pablo de la Vera Cruz, an archeologist at the National University in Arequipa, said examined police photos of the fossil. He said: "The jawbone that was found could be from a triceratops, even though dinosaurs like that have never been found in southern Peru."
People mix up archeologists and paleontologists quite often, so I can't really blame de la Vera Cruz for the misidentification if the news agency wanted a response from him. Still, if you look at the photo in the article, you'll see that the mandible is stout, u-shaped, and there is only one badly worn molar on each side. These are hallmarks of proboscideans (especially having only one large molar on each side of the lower jaw), while a Triceratops jaw would be longer, curve upwards towards the anterior end, and have a battery of many teeth that would shear through plant material like a pair of scissors with the tooth battery in the upper jaw.
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