A professor and student at the University of Southern Maine are using fish bones buried on a coastal island to study the history of fish populations in the Gulf of Maine.

Erin Taylor, a geography-anthropology major from Mount Blue, won a $2,600 Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship for the study and worked with Nathan Hamilton, associate professor of archaeology. Taylor collected fish and other animal bones while the pair did preliminary digs for a field school Hamilton taught on Smutty Nose Island, part of the Isles of Shoals at the Maine-New Hampshire border.

Taylor analyzed the fish remains for clues about the size and diversity of the historic Gulf of Maine fishery. Scientists have made past assumptions about the historic fish populations without such archaeological data, according to the university.

The research by Hamilton and Taylor has been monitored by researchers at the Gulf of Maine Census of Marine Life, and the bones will be the basis of continuing laboratory experiments by researchers at Bates College.