Queen's Quay Whale Vertebra in Toronto, Ontario

During a 1988 transit excavation beneath downtown Toronto's Queen's Quay and Bay Street, workers discovered a killer whale vertebra that has mystified experts ever since. Now housed at the Royal Ontario Museum, the bone is dated to sometime between European settlement and 1840 based on pollen analysis, a timeframe that ruled out one theory linking it to Piper's Zoo, a waterfront establishment that never housed an orca. Per Atlas Obscura, the leading theory is that a 19th-century whaler dropped the vertebra into the harbor, and it eventually became landfill during the early 1900s.

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