Nearly 6 million-year-old 'elephant graveyard' unearthed in Florida

An ancient "elephant graveyard" chock-full of massive bones has been unearthed along what was once a prehistoric river in northern Florida.

The fossils of these long-extinct beasts belong to gomphotheres — a relative of modern elephants — and date to about 5.5 million years ago, during the Miocene epoch.
"It was very exciting because this gave us an opportunity to not only see what an adult [gomphothere] would have looked like, but also to very carefully document each and every bone in its skeleton," said Jonathan Bloch, a curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Florida Museum of Natural History who co-led the excavation. "That's exciting from a scientific perspective if you're trying to understand the anatomy of these animals and something about their biology and evolution," Bloch told Live Science.