Rare skull of elephant ancestor unearthed in France
A French farmer kept quiet for years after stumbling across the skull of an extinct ancestor of the elephant near the Pyrenees mountains, the Natural History Museum of Toulouse has told AFP.
The farmer discovered the first-ever skull of a Pyrenean mastodon in 2014 while doing work on his land near the village of L'Isle-en-Dodon, about 70 kilometers (44 miles) southwest of Toulouse.
Worried that the farm would be overrun by hordes of amateur paleontologists he kept the find a secret for two years before eventually contacting the museum."It was only when we went there, in 2017, that we realized the significance of the discovery," the museum's management said.
The gomphoterium pyrenaicum was "a kind of elephant with four tusks measuring around 80 centimeters, two on the upper jaw and two on the lower jaw," museum director Francis Duranthon told AFP on Wednesday.
Before that the only evidence that the giant herbivores had roamed the area millions of years ago were four teeth found in the same area in 1857.
