Rock and pebbles collection is a very common hobby across the globe. It does not seem that anything could go wrong with this harmless hobby but a boy’s rock collection took a macabre turn when a human bone was discovered by his mother among his collection. This happened two decades ago.
The mother and son duo, who preferred to remain anonymous, said that the rock collection was inherited by the boy’s grandmother. Now, after 20 years of investigation, the origin of the jawbone has been revealed this year.
According to Genealogists, the bone discovered belonged to a Marine who passed away in California in 1951 and was laid to rest in Missouri. Everett Leland Yager, a US Marine Corps captain, was 30 years old when his aircraft crashed during a military training operation on July 31, 1951, as stated by the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office in Arizona. Captain Yager’s remains were found in Riverside County, California, and he was interred in Palmyra, Missouri.
It is however unknown how part of Captain Yager’s remains ended up as the boy’s rock collection. The boy’s mother had contacted the sheriff’s office in 2002 after she identified one of the rocks as a human bone but for 22 years, the mystery behind whose bone it was remained unsolved.
It was only after researchers at the Investigative Genetic Genealogy Center at Ramapo College in Mahwah got involved that the identity was locked. Before that, DNA testing was done on the bone but it matched no one in the US government database.
The bones were sent to Salt Lake City, Utah, where a profile was created using advanced DNA genotyping and uploaded to two genealogy databases. After this, the database was searched and with its help, it was found out whose bone it was. In March 2024, the DNA of the bone was matched with the DNA of the deceased marine’s daughter. Scientists guess that a migrating bird might have taken the bone with itself from one place to another.
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