Nearly 6 million-year-old ‘elephant graveyard’ unearthed in Florida

An historic “elephant graveyard” chock-full of large bones has been unearthed alongside what was as soon as a prehistoric river in northern Florida. 

The fossils of those long-extinct beasts belong to gomphotheres — a relative of recent elephants — and date to about 5.5 million years in the past, in the course of the Miocene epoch. 

“It was very thrilling as a result of this gave us a chance to not solely see what an grownup [gomphothere] would have appeared like, but additionally to very fastidiously doc each bone in its skeleton,” stated Jonathan Bloch, a curator of vertebrate paleontology on the Florida Museum of Pure Historical past who co-led the excavation. “That is thrilling from a scientific perspective if you happen to’re making an attempt to grasp the anatomy of those animals and one thing about their biology and evolution,” Bloch informed Reside Science.

Researchers found the trove of gomphothere bones on the website, a large-scale excavation space close to Gainesville often known as the Montbrook Web site, in 2022. Though excavators had unearthed some gomphothere bones there earlier than, the staff was shocked when a volunteer discovered the stays of an particularly massive particular person.