Villagers in a community have entered the record books after making a historic discovery of one of the ancient Elephant Fossils Dating Back 50,000 years.
The bones of the so-called "Huai River elephant" (Palaeoloxodon)
Locals have made a historic discovery of Dinosaur elephant fossil dating back 50,000 years. The bones of the so-called "Huai River elephant" (Palaeoloxodon) are largely well-preserved with researchers claiming it may be the biggest specimen ever discovered.
The interesting discovery was found villagers in Sihong County, China, the fossils were discovered when locals were preparing a plot of land for building.
It was gathered that the villagers while digging through the soil, accidentally stumbled upon what was later found to be the creature's shoulder bone, which was scattered with other bones on a dry riverbed.
Zou Songmei, a researcher with a provincial geological research institute in Jiangsu, under the Chinese Academy of Social Science (CASS), said that the animal may well have been more than 19ft long, with tusks some 6ft long.
The ancient elephant species, whose name derives from the Huai River, one of China's major rivers after the Yangtze and the Yellow River, is thought to be the cousin of the modern Asian elephant (Elephas maximus) and a distant ancestor of the much larger African elephant (Loxodonta).
Zou determined the age of the particular individual - found in a 2,152sq/ft area - by studying the earth surrounding the fossils. Reports quoted him as saying the elephant carcass may have been eaten by larger carnivores after its death, and its bones, while well-preserved, were most probably scattered by currents from the river that used to run through the area.
The Huai River elephant is thought to have lived between 12,000 and 10,000 years ago, in modern-day China and Japan, dying out suddenly during the late Pleistocene Epoch (2,588,000 to 11,700 years ago).