A utility crew digging a trench in Florida came across a fossilized part of an 11,000-year-old giant ground sloth that was originally named by Thomas Jefferson.
The team in Florida’s Manatee County was excavating to install a waterline when they encountered what they believed was just an ordinary tool buried in the Earth.
“They were digging away and found what they thought was an ordinary tool,” Charlie Hunsicker, the director of Manatee County’s Natural Resources Department, told Fox 13.
A utility crew in Florida found part of a giant ground sloth fossil. Manatee County Government
The tool turned out to be a fossilized claw from a giant ground sloth, an 800-pound behemoth that lived during the tail end of the Great Ice Age.
“This was a wonderful story of happenstance,” Hunsicker said.
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