Farmer Wayne McEwen, together with his son, Marty, found a mammoth skeleton buried in his property in Dallas, Texas.
The two stumbled upon the skeleton when Marty was operating their excavator and noticed some parts of the tusk sticking out of the dirt. They dug in that spot and found the bones and tusk of a beast that was believed to have existed over 40,000 to 60,000 years ago.
"I knew there was stuff on the property. I never had any idea there was a full skeleton," Marty McEwen told USA Today. "If I had actually dug into the sand, I would have torn up both tusks and the skull."
The McEwens make a living from their farm by selling gravel and sand. As soon as his son found the bones and tusk, Wayne immediately called the authorities from the Perot Museum of Nature and Science and inquired if they were interested in the skeleton.
After receiving Wayne's call, the museum sent a team of paleontologists and volunteers to work on the site. They found the rest of the bones that completed the mammoth's skeleton. After a few weeks, they were able to put together the whole skeleton of a nine-foot Columbian mammoth.
The Columbian mammoth is a species that roamed in North Africa during the Pleistocene era. Experts believe that this species interbred with the wooly mammoths, which may explain the similarities between the two. It has spiral tusks that can grow up to 14 feet long.
"A specimen like this gives us such great opportunity to be able to get that nice, accurate, more fleshed-out picture of what these animals were like," Perot Museum paleontologist Ron Tykoski told USA Today.
The mammoth skeleton will be transferred to another facility where researchers will continue their analysis. The team will spend a year to determine its real age, diet, and cause of death, according to Dallas News.
