Workers excavating an underground garage in Los Angeles have uncovered the nearly intact skeleton of a mammoth and the largest known cache of fossils from the last ice age, it was announced on Wednesday.
The treasure trove included the nearly intact Columbian mammoth and fossils of tree trunks, turtles, snails, clams, millipedes, fish and gophers, according to Los Angeles George C. Page Museum.
"This gives us the opportunity to get a detailed picture of what life was like 10,000 to 40,000 years ago" in the Pleistocene ice age, said John Harris, Chief Curator at the museum.
The vast discovery, known as project 23, is expected to boost the number of specimens pulled from the tar to about four million, nearly doubling what has been logged since around the turn of the past century.
Among the 700 newly found specimens are an American Lion skull, lion bones, dire wolves, saber-toothed cats, juvenile horse and bison, a huge prehistoric bird called a teratorn, coyotes, lynx, and ground sloths.
Excavators first discovered the cache a couple of years ago, and researchers have just begun working on huge chunks of soil removed from the site.
The tusks of the mammoth, named as Zed by researchers, are nearly 10 feet long. Because of his significance, Zed was excavated on site.
But, under the direction of researchers, 23 of the 56-ton, asphaltic blocks of earth were crated and removed to be worked on elsewhere -- a move that should expedite the process of removing and cataloguing the specimens.