Michigan Contractor Stumbles Upon 14,000-Year-Old Mastodon Skeleton Buried in Backyard

A Michigan contractor made the find of a lifetime after he dug up the skeleton of a 14,000-year-old Ice Age-era mastodon from his backyard.

Daniel LaPoint Jr. was excavating a property in Bellevue Township in November when he spotted a four-foot-long rib bone jutting out from a pile of earth, reports the Lansing State Journal.

Believing it could be a prehistoric dinosaur bone, he drafted neighbor Eric Witzke to help sift through the rest of the soil. And, after four days, the pair had dug up an astonishing 42 bones.

They contacted University of Michigan paleontologist Daniel Fisher, who after two visits revealed that the pieces of cartilage were in fact that of a 37-year-old male mastodon.

The now-extinct creatures were distant relatives of elephants. They roamed North America between 10,000 and 14,000 years ago, and weighed about 10,000 pounds.

“Preliminary examination indicates that the animal may have been butchered by humans,” Fisher told MLive.com.

“The scientific value is really the new perspective, the new information, that specimens like these can bring,” the director of the U-M Museum of Paleontology added.

LaPoint and Witzke were keen to share their incredible discovery with school children, before the bones were donated to and permanently exhibited at the Ann Arbor-located museum. So they took the collection to Olivet Community Schools, where middle school students spent the day taking a look at them.

“Once these things go to the museum and get crated up, you’re not going to get to touch them again,” LaPoint told the Lansing State Journal.

“All the kids got to pick them up and hold them. Some kids, it was life-changing for them. To change one kid’s life because they got to touch it, I think, is an incredible opportunity,” he added.

Both men said they would be keeping a few segments to display at home, to remind them of the amazing dig.