This may be the saddest story to come down the pike in Springfield for a long time. It's a local story, but it shows that in spite of what they say, all politics isn't always local. Here's what I posted to Facebook:
Here's a link to the story in Archaeology, monthly magazine of the Archaeological Institute of America, at:
Be sure to link through the the Illinois Archaeological Survey's video. It's also available on YouTube at xxxx.
Save the Illinois State Museum, the local single-issue advocacy group that formed when Gov. Rauner closed the museum in connection with his budgetary spat with House Speaker Michael Madigan, D-Chicago, posted the Archaeology magazine's Top 10 story this afternoon to its Facebook feed.
This year archaeologists announced that bones discovered in a Hopewell Mound in Illinois did not belong to a dog, as previously supposed, but to a baby bobcat. It is the first known example of a bobcat buried like a human and is one of ARCHAEOLOGY's Top 10 Discoveries of 2015.
The bones remain in a collection housed at ISM's research facility on 11th Street in Springfield. But they are no longer accessible to scholars since Gov. Rauner closed the museum. The true cost of his political tactics came in the comments section, when A.R. Perri said:
We are really proud of this research. If the ISM reopens we can continue our work on this exciting bobcat find. Until then, any work on the bobcat has to be put on hold, sadly.
A.R. Perri's name isn't a household word, but she has a perspective here. A postdoctoral fellow of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, she is the scientist who discovered the bobkitten skeleton in an ISM collection and began looking into its significance.
More details here, in http://www.archaeology.org/issues/200-1601/features/3955-illinois-hopewell-bobcat-burial, on another magazine webpage:
[Perri] determined that the nearly complete skeleton belonged to a juvenile bobcat, between four and seven months old. The bones show no signs of trauma, indicating the bobkitten likely died of natural causes, probably malnutrition. “It looks like they came across a baby that they tried to raise but failed,” says Perri. “When it died they had become close enough to it that it warranted this special burial.”Along with the bones, Perri found four shell beads and two carved effigies of bear teeth worn as a necklace—grave goods common to Hopewell human burials—making this the only decorated burial of a wild cat found in North America, as well as the only animal buried alone in its own mound. Though the Hopewell had had domesticated dogs for hundreds of years, Perri says that having a tamed bobcat would have been “a very uncommon experience.”
Links to today's YouTube posts:
- https://www.facebook.com/peter.ellertsen/posts/1639393496321690 -- to my FB feed.
- http://www.archaeology.org/issues/200-1601/features/3965-top-10-archaeological-discoveries-of-2015 -- to the Archaeology story and ISM video. Dr. Perri's is the first comment.
