A fossil mastodon skull has been discovered by a group attending a bachelor party at a New Mexico lakeshore that's approximately 10 million years old and will take six months to clean, according to Reuters.
The skull was discovered earlier this week, along with its tusks, buried in sand at Elephant Butte State Park, some 155 miles south of Albuquerque.
Gary Morgan, curator and head paleontologist at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science, led a team that spent some six hours carefully excavating the fossil.
The skull was buried in about four feet of lake silt.
When it finally emerged, it measured in at five feet by three feet and weighed over 1,000 pounds.
"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," Morgan said to Reuters. "I've been here for 20 years and have never seen something like this before."
Mastodons were relatives of the elephant that stood 10 feet (3 meters) tall and migrated to North America approximately 15 million years ago. They became extinct about 10,000 years ago.
The discovery came after some water was drained from the Elephant Butte Lake two weeks ago to provide irrigation for certain sections of southern New Mexico and Texas.
He confirmed that the process of cleaning the fossil would now likely take his team six months before they could start examining it closely, according to Reuters.
The museum will put the fossil on public display, he said, but it will probably take a year before that happens, so that studies can take place.
"This is too important to keep stored in the back," Morgan said.
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