The skeleton of a long-dead mastodon was discovered in a Michigan backyard last November when a contractor's excavator dug-up some soil.

Contractor Daniel LaPoint Jr. dug-up 42 mastodon bones from a Bellevue Township home of his neighbor Eric Witzke on Babcock Road.

While both assumed the bones to be dinosaur bones, experts from the University of Michigan knew the skeleton was actually a mastodon. These Ice Age beasts weighed up to five tons and are the ancestors of elephants. Researchers believed that it could be up to 14,000 years old.

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The two men will donate the bones to the University of Michigan Museum of Paleontology

Daniel Fisher, the director of the university museum, has made two trips to confirm and examine the find. He said there have been a total of 330 confirmed mastodon bone discoveries in Michigan but there were only two in 2014.

Most of the bones were found in the southern half of the lower peninsula. The bones include several rib bones, leg, shoulder and hip bones, the base of a tusk and pieces of the animal's vertebrae.

"Preliminary examination indicates that the animal may have been butchered by humans. The scientific value is really the new perspective, the new information, that specimens like these can bring," said Fisher.

TagsMichigan Contractor, Mastodon Bones, dinosaur bones, ice age era, Dinosaur era, Bellevue Township, ancient elephants