INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Toulouse, 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 kilometres (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 realised the significance of the discovery," the museum's management said.The
gomphoterium pyrenaicum was "a kind of elephant with four tusks measuring around 80 centimetres, 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.The full skull will allow to get a clearer picture of the anatomy of
the species"Now we have a full skull which will allow us to get a clearer picture of the anatomy of this species," Duranthon said. "We're
putting a face on a species which had become almost mythical," the museum's curator Pierre Dalous added.The skull has been unearthed and
brought to a laboratory partly encased in rock."Now we have to chip away, centimetre by centimetre, to reveal the rest of the skull," Dalous
said, adding that experts were halfway through the work which is expected to be completed within six to nine months.(Except for the
headline, this story has not been edited by TheIndianSubcontinent staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
