Neighbors Dig Up Mastodon Bones in Michigan Backyard

— -- Nearly 40 mastodon bones will soon find their place in a Michigan museum after a pair of neighbors stumbled upon the bones in one of their backyards.

Eric Witzke recruited his neighbor, contractor Daniel LaPoint, to dig up a pond last November in the backyard of his home in Bellevue Township, Michigan.

As the two men dug, they realized they were excavating something much more than just dirt.

"It was just something different. I automatically assumed dinosaur. That's what popped into my head," LaPoint told local news station WWMT.

"It was amazing to see these bones and see the size of these bones coming up out of the ground," Witzke told WWMT.

After uncovering a total of 42 bones, Witzke and LaPoint realized they had discovered the skeleton of a mastodon, a prehistoric creature related to the modern-day elephant that began to disappear tens of thousands of years ago.

“I’m speechless because it's just a once-in-a-lifetime find," LaPoint said.

The two men said they plan to donate their findings later this month to the University of Michigan Museum of Paleontology in Ann Arbor.

Museum Director Daniel Fisher has visited the excavation site in Witzke's backyard and said he believes the mastodon was a male in his mid-30s.

"There are a few marks on the bones that are suggestive of some sort of post-mortem processing, like butchering," Fisher said. "The challenge is to distinguish such marks from excavation damage."

LaPoint and Witzke told Fisher they found the mastodon's bones about 12 feet into the ground.

"What’s really of potential interest most here is when there’s a significant part of an individual preserved, there’s potential to learn much more about the biology of the animal and the nature of the environment," Fisher said. "There’s also information to learn on sustenance practices of local humans."

LaPoint told the Lansing State Journal he and Witzke plan to keep a few of the bones for themselves for the memory of their once-in-a-lifetime find.

"Finding them was very, very cool," he said. "You know, after time goes by and you have the bones it wears off, the excitement. Digging and finding the bones for the first time, it's not something that can be replicated. It really is a once-in-a-lifetime thing."