Two Florida divers earlier this month uncovered a 50-pound leg bone from a Columbian Mammoth while scuba diving in the Peace River earlier this month, reports Fox News.
The bone, thought to be a femur or thigh of an extinct distant relative of the Asian elephant that last roamed the Earth over 10,000 years ago, was found by Henry Sadler, a St. Petersburg, Fla., teacher.
Derek Demeter, a planetarium director in Seminole State who was with Sadler, knew his dive partner had discovered something huge from the excitement in his voice.
He yelled out to me, said, ‘Hey, Derek. I found something!’ Oh my goodness!’ It was really, really cool,” said Derek Demeter, the Seminole State Planetarium Director.
“The thing I love about it is, (it’s) just like astronomy, it’s time traveling. It plays with the imagination, so you go Wow, what was going on at this time?’” he said.
The leg wasn’t the only precious find for divers Derek Demeter and Henry Sadler that day. They also picked up the tooth of a saber-tooth tiger in the river muck. Sadler has previously found mammoth teeth in the Peace River, the Orlando Sentinel reports.
The huge bone will sit in Sadler’s middle school classroom so he can educate the kids with it.
“It brings us joy to know that we can uncover stuff that really gets people excited” said Demeter.
Source: Newmax
