There’s bound to be a bone or two at a bachelor party, but not THIS kind of bone!
A group of people celebrating a bachelor party last week at Elephant Butte State Park in New Mexico accidentally unearthed a 10 million year old fossilized mastodon skull!
Apparently Elephant Butte Lake was drained a bit recently, and that’s why the group was able to find the mastodon skull in the sand.
Enter: Gary Morgan, the curator and head paleontologist at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science, who assembled a team that spent six hours digging up the bone on Thursday. Once out of the ground, the fossilized skull turned out to be 5 x 3 feet and weighs over 1,000lbs!
Morgan explained the history behind this head, saying:
“This mastodon find is older than the woolly mammoth that tread the Earth in the Ice Age. … It probably died on a sandbar of the ancient Rio Grande River├óΓé¼┬ª I’ve been here for 20 years and have never seen something like this before.”
Luckily, even if you weren’t a part of that fortuitous bachelor party, the museum is planning to put the skull on display… but not for a year. Apparently, that’s how long it will take to clean and study the bones.
We can’t wait!
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