A farmer near Chelsea, Mich. found something truly mammoth in 2015.
James Bristle and a neighbor were digging a trench in his soybean field. The backhoe hit something about eight feet (2.4 metres) underground.
The hard object was a three-foot-long (0.9-metre) bone belonging to a Jeffersonian mammoth – a hybrid between a woolly mammoth and a Columbian mammoth.
A team from the University of Michigan’s Museum of Paleontology excavated the site and found about 20 percent of the animal’s skeleton, including its skull, tusks, ribs and pelvis.