BOSQUE COUNTY, Texas (KWTX) – It’s not every day that someone accidentally stumbles upon millennia-old mammoth remains, but that’s exactly what happened to a Central Texas resident.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Tarleton State Geoscience Department, and Waco Mammoth National Monument are currently working together to safely excavate these fossils.

In June, Sabrina Solomon was fishing on the lake with a friend when she literally stumbled upon a piece of fossil.

“I was walking up the hill with all the clay, it was really wet and slippery, and finally I fell down and came face to face with the specimen,” Solomon said.

She noticed that it looked strange and felt like she had found more than just stones.

“I told my best friend and said, ‘those are dinosaur bones,’ you know,” Solomon said. “We thought it was actually like the backbone of something, or at least that’s what it looked like to us.”

So she alerted the park… and when Jarod Briscoe, the lead park ranger for the lake where the remains were found, caught a glimpse of it, he immediately contacted Tarleton State University’s Department of Geosciences.

“When I came here, my initial assumption, based on my limited knowledge, was that it was a mammoth,” Briscoe said.

For confirmation, Tarleton’s Earth Sciences Department sent Kris Juntunen, a lecturer in the department.

“When I arrived here, I saw a tusk about ten to twelve centimeters long. It was pretty clear that it was a mammoth,” Juntunen explained.

He gathered some students and asked Dr. Lindsey Yann from Waco Mammoth National Monument to come and help with the excavation.

Once the entire team was on site, it didn’t take long for more fossils to be discovered.

Dr. Yann shared that “there is part of what could be a skull, a radius bone or part of an arm bone, and parts of some vertebral bones.”

Based on the fossils alone, they concluded that it was a 40-year-old male Columbian mammoth, about 20,000 years old, and similar to specimens on display at the Waco mammoth archaeological site.

“It’s so hard to imagine them walking through your own garden. Every time we find one in our garden, our imagination is stimulated,” said Dr Yann. “And even a small find like this and the other finds in this area tell us a lot about the paleontological history of this area.”

According to Juntunen, once the fossils are recovered from the earth, they will be taken to Tarleton State University, where they will be preserved and studied for years to come.

Shortly before excavations began, two of the mammoth’s teeth were removed from the site, but fortunately they were returned to the Bosque County Sheriff’s Office.

To protect the site and prevent further tampering, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers asked KWTX not to reveal the exact location of the mammoth bones until they were safely removed.

This also serves as a reminder: If you come across something that may be an archaeological or paleontological discovery, leave it alone and contact the appropriate authorities.

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