Pool excavation uncovers bones buried thousands of years, Nevada official says

A Nevada couple woke up one morning this week to police outside their window, standing with the construction crews hired to build their new pool, media reports said.

The workers had discovered “an actual skeleton” of a horse that lived thousands of years ago while they excavated on Monday, Joshua Bonde, the director of research for the Nevada Science Center, told the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

“The bones were in the leg position attached to one another, which is actually really rare preservation for that area,” said Bonde, according to the newspaper.

Bonde estimates the skeleton is likely between 6,000 and 14,000 years old, he said in an email to McClatchy News. The animal would have lived around the time of Earth’s most recent ice age, according to KXXV.

Matthew Perkins, who recently moved to Las Vegas from Washington with his husband, told KXXV he had jokingly considered the possibility that crews may find a prehistoric creature during the excavation.

“We had joked on Friday ... while they started digging, ‘Oh great maybe they will find a dinosaur for us and it will pay for our pool,’” said Perkins, according to the TV station. “Obviously, when they told us they found some fossils, that was more of a shock to us than we were expecting.”

While Metropolitan police officers wanted to discard the bones and the construction company wanted to build over them, Perkins and his husband chose to contact the Nevada Science Center to see if the bones could be extracted, the Review-Journal reported.

“It’s actually surprisingly rare given the amount of development that’s happening up there, just because they are so close to the fossil beds,” Bonde told the newspaper. “But it should become more common as more and more excavations occur.”

While some of Bonde’s colleagues would hesitate to classify the bones as fossils without knowing for sure whether they are at least 10,000 years old, he said he would classify them that way. Radiocarbon dating will determine the exact age, Bonde told McClatchy.

The property isn’t far from Tule Springs Fossil Beds National Monument, where rare fossils, including those of mammoths, have been found in the past, media outlets reported.

This story was originally published April 29, 2021 at 2:36 PM.