[kai]

Hello Thor,

I'm duly aware that the interstitial zone of hippo tusks sometimes produce dark inclusions along the lateral margins, but similar "spots in a row" can be found in other types of ivory: The inner cementum of walrus or longitudinally along deep age cracks in tusks of the proboscids, for example.

Do you have any pics of such examples? The mottled areas of walrus make it usually less difficult to spot if the pieces are of reasonable size; while I have also seen spots with elephant, these seemed much less regularly distributed compared to hippo.

I was just hoping that maybe you had an academic reference up your sleeve to tie them to the hippo.

Thanks for the reminder - still need to search my wide sleeves...

In general I think one should exercise care in assigning a source species to any ivory based on one character alone. -this goes x10 when we're doing it from photographs of course.

D'accord.

I can recommend the article "Unusual appearance of Schreger-like pattern in Hippopotamus amphibius ivory" (Simms, 2010). -I don't agree with their conclusions, but their findings illustrate this point very well.

Here's the link !

Regards,
Kai