spinal column

ミシガン州に住む11歳の少年が、ザリガニ釣りに行ったら思いがけないものを釣り上げました。

Michigan cousins go after crayfish, hook a mastodon

CNN) -- An 11-year-old from Michigan said he is going to really wow his schoolmates Friday with the "coolest" show-and-tell item anyone's ever brought to the sixth grade.

After all, it's not every day you get to show off a 13,000-year-old mastodon bone you and your cousin found in a stream behind your backyard.

"I thought it was a rock at first, but a couple minutes later I looked more at it, and I didn't think it was a dinosaur bone, but I wasn't sure," Eric Stamatin of Shelby Township Michigan told CNN on Thursday.

He and Andrew Gainariu, 11, from Troy, Michigan, were hunting for crayfish in the stream that extends from the middle branch of the Clinton River, as they often did, when they "got bored" and decided to build a dam.

They made an extraordinary discovery that June day.

John Zawiskie, a geologist and paleontologist at the Cranbrook Institute of Science confirmed in early November that what the "kids just being kids outside" discovered was not a rock at all, but an axis, a specialized second vertebrae behind the skull in the spinal column of an American mastodon.

"These animals have been extinct for 10,000 years," Zawiskie told CNN. He works extensively on subjects in this time period, and noticed the distinct bone from the prehistoric elephant-like mammal right away.

"Oh my gosh, we were like psyched," Stamatin said of learning it was a real mastodon bone. "I was like I think we are the first people in Michigan to find a bone (who) are only 11 years old."

http://edition.cnn.com/2012/12/13/us/michigan-dinosaur-find/index.html?hpt=us_c2

今回気になった表現は、spinal column です。columnという単語を見ると、（新聞・雑誌などの）コラムという意味が私は真っ先に思い浮かびますが、その意味は18世紀から使われはじめたそうです。columnには「円柱、柱」「柱状の物」という意味があり、ここではspinal「脊髄の；脊柱[背骨]の（ある）」という形容詞と一緒に使われることで、spinal column「脊柱」という意味で使われています。（『ウィズダム英和辞典　第2版』三省堂）

外で遊ぶ子供らしい子供でなければ、起きなかった発見かもしれません。（Astroriver)