A party to remember ... palaeontologist Gary Morgan stands over a the fossil of a stegomastodon skull discovered in a remote area of Elephant Butte State Park, New Mexico. Source: AP
A GROUP of men attending a bachelor party in New Mexico have stumbled on a three-million-year-old mastodon skull.
The Telegraph reports the partygoers were hiking through Elephant Buttle Lake State Park, outside Albuquerque — deep in Breaking Bad territory — when they saw what they appeared to be a giant bone poking out of the sand.
When the men started digging, the perfectly preserved skull emerged from the desert best known as Walter White's old stamping ground.
Maybe if they'd kept going, they could have found one of his stray barrels of money?
In an unusually responsible move for a bachelor party, the group, thinking they had found the remains of a woolly mammoth, sent photos of the fossils to the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science.
In fact, the bones belonged to a stegomastodon — an even older ancestor of today's elephant that became extinct about 10,000 years ago.
An archeology group dug up the 450-kilogram skull — which likely belonged to a six-tonne creature that stood around 2.7 metres tall — and took it back to the museum for further study.
"This mastodon find is older than the woolly mammoth that tread the Earth in the Ice Age," said Gary Morgan, a palaeontologist at the museum. "It probably died on a sandbar of the ancient Rio Grande River.
"This is far and away the best one we've ever found."
For Antonia Gradillas, who was out with the group celebrating their friend's upcoming wedding, the buck's party will be one to remember (unlike most others).
"This is the coolest thing ever," he said. "Some people with PhDs in this field might not even have this kind of opportunity. We were so lucky."
It sure beats finding a tiger in your bathroom.
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