Mysteries Overhead and Underfoot

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Return to Dakar, back to school, return to the work routine.  Good to have a week down.  Mister Spedding's back in costume.

It seems that my eagle-eyed students -- Will, Yoel, Adam and Damir -- have been finding a lot of interesting artifacts around campus this past week, mostly in the shell-rich ground cover around ISD.  I suspect that the shells are old, coming either from geologically old sedimentary marine layers, or from prehistoric (likely Neolithic) shell mounds.  (Professor Thiaw has mentioned this in his writing.)

It happens that we've been talking about/looking at prehistoric artifacts in our current unit on human ancestry.  

Amongst the cool things discovered by students this past week was the object shown above in photos 2-5.  Consensus is that it is a jaw, lined with little teeth, but of what?  A turtle?  Thoughts?

W. shared with me a very different object, shown in photos 6-9.  He found it in the middle of ISD's large athletic field.  It's metal, one side with a pumice/scorie-like surface, fused with air vesicles, another side with several round bits, as if worked or machined. 

So what is this object, and how did it end up in the middle of a grassy field? 

Being that the simplest explanation is usually the correct explanation, then someone must of dropped the object while walking across the field.  A few of the kids speculate that the object was dropped by a bird.  Whether pooped or carried in a beak, that must have been some painful baggage.

But what is it exactly?

R. thinks it's welding slag, the round bits being metal that curled in welding. 

I prefer to think big (some would prefer to use the word delusional), and offer a more exotic, astronomical solution:  The object is clearly space debris that survived reentry into the atmosphere.  There's a lot of it up there, you know.  See image 1 and these web sites (hunks of junk, space junk, NASA Orbital Debris Program) in support my albeit slightly fantastic, wishful theory. 

I'm sending the photos to NASA.  If they verify that the object's space junk, I'll be back to gloat.  If not, well, you'll not hear another word about it.