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Dear Charlie, Horse bones are not easy to sex. Sexual dimorphism is not great. However, there are slight size differences that you can sometimes pick out if you have a very big sample - many years ago (in my PhD) I did a principal components analysis which did this to a certain extent. Well developed canines are, to my knowledge, only found in males, though vestigal ones are quite often found in females. The pelvis can sometimes be sexed especially in mature individuals. See Sisson and Grossman's Anatomy of Domestic Animals for quite a lot of detail about when it can an cannot be done - ie young horses can't, it seems, be reliably sexed and males gelded young share some features with mares. best wishes, Marsha On Oct 24 2005, Charlie Stokes wrote: >Dear All, > >Can anybody point me in the direction of literature >dealing with sexing horse skeletons from the bones? > >I'm not having any success in finding anything at the >moment (but I could well be looking in the wrong >place!) > >thanks > >charlie > > > >___________________________________________________________ >How much free photo storage do you get? Store your holiday >snaps for FREE with Yahoo! Photos http://uk.photos.yahoo.com > -- Dr. Marsha Levine, McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge CB2 3ER, England phone: +44 (0)1223-339347 / fax: +44 (0)1223-339285 http://www.arch.cam.ac.uk/~ml12/