Man Digs Up Mammoth Skeleton in Back Yard

Have you ever checked—really checked—your back yard for the remains of ancient prehistoric beasts? Because that's what an Iowa man found on his property two years ago, ABC 5 reports. "I got down on my hands and knees on the bank and I could see a marrow line," he says. "I said boys, that's a bone, that's a really big bone." Indeed, the 4-foot-long femur turned out to belong to a mammoth that could be 100,000 years old.

Now University of Iowa experts are helping him dig up the rest of it, and they expect to uncover its head in a few weeks. "It's pretty exciting," one tells ABC, "partially because the mammoth is being discovered where it died," as evidenced by the number of bones. Since the Iowa man found the bones on his land, he owns them—and so far, he's been keeping them in his living room. "Sometimes I get tired of moving bones around," he says. (More woolly mammoth stories.)