LAS VEGAS — A pool excavation turned into an archaeological discovery for a Las Vegas couple.
Workers constructing a pool unearthed a set of bones that could be 14,000 years old, KTNV reported.
Matt Perkins and his husband recently moved from Washington state to a newly built home in Las Vegas, the television station reported.
They were eagerly anticipating the completion of their new 6-foot-deep pool, but then Las Vegas police arrived at their home on Monday.
“Monday morning we woke up (and) the pool guy said he was going to come to check out the pool,” Perkins told KTNV. “We assume that was normal, we wake up he’s out front with the police.”
The workers discovered the bones about 5 feet beneath the ground. After a police investigation determined the bones did not belong to a human, Nevada Science Center research director Joshua Bonde was called to the residence on Tuesday, KTNV reported.
“What we found was when they were excavating the backyard pool, they were cutting through ice age layers of sediment and sure enough they had a skeleton of an animal,” Perkins told the television station.
Bonde said the bones are between 6,000 and 14,000 years old and belong to a horse or similar large mammal.
“So this thing is about four to five feet below the present ground surface and so the animal was probably wandering around the world in southern Nevada, which was not nearly as populated as it is today,” Bonde told the television station. “There were probably still people in the area and was probably a little bit marshy.”
Perkins’ home is near Tule Springs Fossil Beds National Monument, where rare fossils such as mammoths have been unearthed before.
“We had joked on Friday that while they started digging, ‘Oh great, maybe they will find a dinosaur for us and it will pay for our pool,’” Perkins told KTNV. “Obviously, when they told us they found some fossils, that was more of a shock to us than we were expecting.”