Paleontologists have uncovered a graveyard of ancient elephant relatives.
An ancient"elephant graveyard" chock-full of massive bones has been unearthed along what was once a prehistoric river in northern Florida.
"It was very exciting because this gave us an opportunity to not only see what an adult [gomphothere] would have looked like, but also to very carefully document each and every bone in its skeleton," said Jonathan Bloch, a curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Florida Museum of Natural History who co-led the excavation.
"I started coming upon one after another of toe and ankle bones," Dean Warner, a retired chemistry teacher and Montbrook volunteer, said in a statement."As I continued to dig, what turned out to be the ulna and radius [long arm bones] started to be uncovered."Eventually, the team excavated entire skeletons from one adult and at least seven juvenile gomphotheres.
The animals likely died hundreds of years apart rather than all at once. The researchers believe the adult drowned at this location, while the other animals were likely swept up by the water after dying and accumulated at a bend in the river. Bloch called the pile-up a"bonejam," similar to when too many loose logs clog up a river to create a logjam.
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