Fossilized Spine
| Fossilized Spine | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Type | Collection |
| Location | Ginger Island |
| Sell Price | 100g |
The Fossilized Spine is the bone that comes up on a fishing line. Casting into the river that runs through the Ginger Island Dig Site is what produces it, which makes this the one piece of Professor Snail's big skeleton that rewards a rod rather than a pickaxe or a hoe. It arrives in place of a fish, like a piece of treasure hauled out of the riverbed, and one is enough for the Large Animal display in the Island Field Office. That skeleton pays six Golden Walnuts and a Banana Sapling when its last bone goes in. Any spare vertebrae make fertiliser in a Bone Mill or cloth at a Sewing Machine, and no villager in the valley will thank a farmer for one.
The in-game description reads: A column of interlocking vertebrae.
Overview
The Dig Site sits in the northern part of Ginger Island, past the bridge that a parrot rebuilds for ten Golden Walnuts. A river cuts through the excavation, and a rod cast there pulls up ordinary island fish along with the spine. Nothing about the catch is difficult: it comes up as an item rather than a fight, so even a Bamboo Pole will land one.
Fishing is worth doing at the dig for its own sake. The same water carries the island's river fish, and a farmer waiting on the spine can fill a bin at the same time. Bubbling spots speed things up, and a cast into one raises the odds of anything at all appearing on the line.
The spine fills one slot on the Large Animal frame in the Field Office, which also calls for two legs, the ribcage, the skull and the tail. Professor Snail runs that tent only after being freed from the cave above the dig, where a boulder has to be blown apart to let him out. The reward for the skeleton is held back until every bone is handed over, so a lone spine buys nothing but a tick on the wall chart. The hint button on the donation screen is useful here, since the professor says plainly that the river is where to look.
A second spine has three homes. The Bone Mill takes one and returns fertiliser, which may be Quality Fertilizer, either grade of Speed-Gro or Tree Fertilizer, and the mill now and then hands back a double batch for a single bone. The spool of a Sewing Machine turns the spine into the Skeleton Shirt. The dye pots in Emily and Haley's house at 2 Willow Lane accept it as a yellow dye, which is handy for anyone colouring a shirt sewn from the same bones.
Gunther is the other customer. His Fragments Of The Past order appears on the Special Orders board and asks for a hundred bone items inside a week, counting anything bone-shaped that the farm can gather, and the pay is 3,500g with the Bone Mill recipe on top. A fishing trip to the island river adds straight to that total.
Notes
Luck has no say in whether the spine shows up, so a gloomy fortune on the morning television is no reason to leave the rod at home.
Once all four of the professor's specimens are complete and the island surveys on his wall have been answered, he parts with the Ostrich Incubator recipe. That machine hatches the Ostrich Egg buried near the volcano, which turns a pile of old bones into a live bird on the farm.
All Collections
Every entry in this group, with its key details.
