On Monday, a Michigan farmer digging in his field came upon the ancient remains of a butchered woolly mammoth. “It was probably a rib bone that came up,” said the man who just fulfilled the fantasies of 5-year-old aspiring paleontologists everywhere. “We thought it was a bent fence post.”

A professor at the University of Michigan, Dan Fisher, who helped excavate the skeleton, told the Ann Arbor News that the enormous animal had likely been around 40 years old, lived between 10,000 and 15,000 years ago, and appeared to have been hunted down by humans who would have killed it, butchered it, and weighed the pieces down, with rocks, in a pond.

“They did that to store meat and come back to it later,” Fisher said. Smart!

The discovery was made by farmer James Bristle and his friend, working in a soy field in Lima Township, in Michigan’s Washtenaw County. Fisher said that there had only been 10 similar finds in Michigan, although many more mastodons (around 300) have been found.

According to the New York Times, researchers have found the mammoth’s skull and tusks, as well as vertebrae, a pelvis, pieces of its shoulder blades, and one kneecap; however, the animal’s fore and hind limbs are missing. It’s possible they had already been eaten.

Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.