Scholars are hailing the discovery of a fossilised mastodon jaw discovered by a man who spotted two giant teeth while gardening at his upstate New York home this year.
The mastodon jaw and some other bone fragments were found in late September in a backyard near Scotchtown, a hamlet about 112km (70 miles) northwest of New York City, officials from the New York State Museum said.
The owner of the backyard does not want to be identified, said Robert Feranec, the state museum’s director of research and collections and curator of Ice Age animals.
The individual spotted what he first thought were baseballs, Feranec said Wednesday. “He picked them up and realised they were teeth,” he said.
Excavation by staff from the museum and the State University of New York’s Orange County campus yielded a full, well-preserved jaw of an adult mastodon as well as a piece of a toe bone and a rib fragment, museum officials said.