A farmer probably got the surprise of a lifetime when he discovered and dug up the skeletons of a woolly mammoth on Monday, September 28.
According to Unilad, the Michigan farmer named James Bristle was digging in his soybean field - to pave the way for a natural gas pipeline -- using his tractor when he hit something he couldn't quite figure out as to what it was.
That time, Bristle first thought it was a "bent post," only finding out later that his amazing discovery was in fact the remains of a mammoth.
Talking to Ann Arbor of M Live, James Bristle said: "We thought it was a bent fence post." Apparently, it was a 2-foot rib bone of the said mammoth.
Experts - 15 paleontologists to be exact -- arrived on the scene and after more digging, the team found mammoth tusks, its vertebrae, a pelvis, some pieces of its shoulder blades and ribs, and a kneecap.
Professor from University of Michigan Dan Fisher was one of the experts who helped in excavating the area, and he said that the mammoth lived over 10,000 years ago.
Talking to the Detroit Free Press, Dan Fisher said that it was "one of the more complete sets of woolly mammoth bones ever to be found in the state."
In addition, Fisher also stated that the ancestral beast wasn't likely to be a woolly mammoth. Instead, it's a cross between a woolly mammoth and a Columbian mammoth.
Furthermore, the mammoth - deemed to be 40 years old at the time of its death - "was likely to have been hunted, butchered into prehistoric steaks and stored by humans somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000 years ago," as reported by IFL Science.
The mammoth is missing its hind legs and feet, which suggests that humans had eaten these parts of the animal.
Not only that, but three basketball-sized rocks were also found around the carcass. Experts believe that the rocks were used as anchors to weigh the beast down in a pond - possibly for later preservation.
