Just An Oddly Shaped Rock Or Evidence That There Was Once Life On Mars?

[sandyRoe]

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/alien-thigh-bone-on-mars-excitement-from-alien-hunters-at-evidence-of-extraterrestrial-life-9685227.html

[heathfield]

Looks like lumps of concrete, too! Maybe it's the remains of a Martian natural history museum!

[ChillDoubt]

Can't believe the Independent has morphed into the Sunday Sport.

[Mosaic]

Difficult to knw what's in the picture without the help of a scale.

[starone]

I can only see plenty of dirt and dust there. Perhaps if there is dirt there could conceivably have been plants, that is, of course, if there was any water there! All these 'ifs', - oh well!

[mibn2cweus]

Obviously another of the devil's clever tricks to test your faith, Sandy.

[sunny-dave]

This what you mean CD?

https://c2.staticflickr.com/6/5226/5683785190_45962b83f9_z.jpg

[ll_billym]

^^ They actually printed a follow-up story to that one: http://tinyurl.com/nvwhhuk

[Jeza]

OR another conspiracy theory.

[jim360]

Just an oddly-shaped rock. Next...

[sandyRoe]

Pragmatism leaves no place for speculation, conjecture, or fantasy.

[Henrietta]

We can either choose to bury our heads firmly in the sand or wake up and open our eyes and minds at centuries of hidden riddles/facts/truths being thrown in front of us to decipher.

[sandyRoe]

The toast could be the work of charlatans or con men. I can't see how a bone exposed by the raging winds of Mars could profit anybody.

[jim360]

The really sad thing about this is that clearly some people can only get excited about alien life if it's large and complex. If life existed on Mars it probably never had a chance to get going beyond microbial life but discovering that would be no less incredible.

Put it this way: if the bones of large animals can be found on Mars then the search for any trace of life there at all would have turned something up long ago. That large animal would require a large and varied ecosystem to support it, such a system would have taken many millions of years to develop, and even if it no longer existed then the soil would be rich with chemical signatures that screamed "life was here!" so loudly that it would have been easily detected by now.

Reasoning backwards from the comparative lack of evidence so far tells you that life on Mars didn't hold on for very long and stayed at a small scale, if it existed at all.

[Canary42]

Another Piltdown Man (i.e. an archaeological hoax)

[Svejk]

perhaps it flew there from Venus, clever clogs.

[sandyRoe]

I suppose it might be the bony remains of a Venusian cosmotrix.
Women are from Venus men are from Mars.

[Mosaic]

When I worked in museums we'd sometimes get presented with a dinosaur's claw by an excited punter - disappointing to reveal it's an eroded-out piece of an ancient wind-blown dune, river-bed or estuary, with the unexciting name of 'turbidite'. Wind-blown deposits and even a little ancient water all fit with what's suspected for Mars's past. But we don't know what this exact object is until we know. Everything else is speculation. We are free to speculate as wildly or as unimaginatively as we like.

[aelmpvw]

if only it was a rib cage and skull ...

[janbee]

Maybe Dinosaurs or Michael Portillo once roamed Mars...