Daniel LaPoint Jr. thought he was going to have a usual day until he chanced upon an incredible find, digging up a set of massive bones in his neighbor's backyard. The contractor first thought he had unearthed dinosaur remains, but experts clarified that what they found were bones from a mastodon, a distant relative of the elephant.
Teaming up with his neighbor Eric Witzke, LaPoint took four days to dig up all of the other bones before consulting experts from the University of Michigan. Later in the month, most of the bones will be donated to the university's Museum of Paleontology. Witzke refers to the find as "pure luck."
Daniel Fisher, museum director, made two trips to Bellevue Township to examine and confirm the discovery, saying about 330 bone discoveries have been confirmed in the state. However, just two were reported in the last year and sometimes all people find are a tusk or a tooth. The collection from the backyard included several rib bones, shoulder, hip and leg bones, pieces of mastodon vertebrae and the base of a tusk.
Fisher adds that preliminary examination puts the mastodon bones as belonging to a 37-year-old male. As the bones show tool marks in certain places, it is also thought that the animal was butchered and buried by humans. The bones are placed at 10,000 to 14,000 years old. A more definite age will be provided once the bones are thoroughly examined at the museum.
The discovery rekindled LaPoint's childhood interest in prehistoric animals so the two men decided to share their remarkable experience, taking the mastodon bones to Olivet Community Schools. There, middle school students spent a day getting up close and personal with the collection.
"Once these things go to the museum and get crated up, you're not going to get to touch them again. It's over with and I was that kid who wanted to touch that thing on the other side of the glass. All the kids got to pick them up and hold them. Some kids, it was life-changing for them. To change one kid's life because they got to touch it, I think, is an incredible opportunity," said LaPoint.
Most of the mastodon bones discovered in Michigan were from the southern half of the state's lower peninsula. The elephant's distant relative can weigh up to five tons as an adult and is sometimes mistaken for a woolly mammoth.
