Sea cow used for Iban hilts

[fearn]

Well, I can call someone a paleozoologist, but the way it tends to work, if you're a paleontologist, you typically study vertebrates. Otherwise, you're a paleobotanist, an invertebrate paleontologist, a paleoecologist, a paleoclimatologist, or whatever.

Go read the tetrapod zoology blog if you want to get an idea of what they do and what they're interested in.

That said the question is, is the bone from a dugong. There are a couple of ways to figure that out:
--destructively, with DNA sampling (bore into the bone, away from the surface treatment)
--non-destructively, by figuring out what bone it is (most likely rib or large vertebra) and matching it to the corresponding piece of a skeleton.

That's why you want a comparative anatomist. Paleontologists use this skill all the time, because typically, they get bits of bones from unknown organisms, and have to figure out not only what bone they have, but what the organism was and what it looked like. That's effectively the puzzle you have here.

So yes, you want a bone dude(or dudette). Preferably, you want an institution that has a dugong skeleton to hand, so you can figure out which bone it was by lining it up against the unaltered version. If it's not a dugong, the choices get interesting. Whale? Dolphin? Rhinoceros? Horse? Bovine? Human? There aren't a huge number of large-boned animals in that part of the world, so you should be able to work it out.

F