GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — Kent County Drain Commissioner Ken Yonker was left in complete surprise Friday afternoon when crews discovered Mastodon bones.
Yonker was in a meeting when he got the picture. And when he looked at it, he said, "That's sure not a horse."
It was one of his engineers who texted him that it was Mastodon bones.
It took a while for the news to sink in, but when it did, the excitement continued to build amongst them.
And the excitement had reached new heights when the discovery was confirmed by the University of Michigan. When that verification came, Yonker said, "We got the real thing here."
He hopes that his crews can locate the rest of the animal and not just part of it. And the good news is that Yonker said they've found traces of two different mastodons.
Now, discovering something like this is not that common, and believe it or not, the crew wasn't looking for the bones in the purpose of their original dig.
They were digging to do maintenance work on the gears in what Yonker says is called the Inner County drain, one shared between Kent and Ionia County.
Yonker went more in depth about the dig saying, "So this was a pretty good sized project that was taking place. And part of that was replacing the culvert under the road and had to be upsize. The current one was too too small. So we're had the road dug up to put the culvert and he was just clearing into the private property section of the drain."
One of the crew members then uncovered something: A glimpse of a red bone that he thought was a tile.
A contractor and another crew member came over and cleaned the area around it with a shovel. That's when one of them said it looked like a dinosaur bone.
They took pictures of what they saw, and the rest is history.
The news couldn't have come at a better time, as Yonker said there was just so much bad news going around. So to get something like this is downright exciting.
"We're looking back at the past of our existence and, and where we are, and it's just, it just kind of puts a little perspective on where we are who we are on this earth."
So much so, that he wonders if they have been walking around on earth a lot longer than people might think. And Yonker says that because the bones were only under four feet of dirt.
Though, after speaking to someone from the University of Michigan, he was told that there are many reasons why the bones find themselves really close to the surface. One reason, as it was in this particular case: The area once was a huge lake so they could have fallen through the ice and drowned. So as the water dried, they were left in the mucky bottom.
And yet, while all of this is really exciting, the crew still has a job to do.
The drain commissioner assured that the road project will continue, "but the road will probably be closed just a little bit longer than than usual. But so what, you know, I mean, that this is a piece of our past," he said. "And how often are you ever going to have some kind of a discovery like this? So the fact that job gets held back a few more days, I think we'll, we'll move on and be just fine. And the meantime, we're going to have some pretty cool looking skeletons of a mess."
The bones will eventually be put on display in the Grand Rapids Public Museum. And even better news? The museum says you can stay up to date on the process and excavation on their Facebook.
And when asked about his final thought about the bizarre discovery, Yonker said, "The Kent County drain commission position gets you into a lot of unusual circumstances. And I'll tell you, this is one of my best."
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