A surprising discovery has been made by pool installers in Las Vegas – a set of bones that could be up to 14,000 years old!

Pool installers in Las Vegas have made a surprising discovery whilst digging in a couple’s backyard – a set of bones that could be up to 14,000 years old!

Matt Perkins, who recently moved to Las Vegas with his husband, reports waking up on Monday morning to find police officers in his backyard speaking to the pool installers. Panic set in as it came to light the workers had discovered buried bones in their backyard!

Minds eased as it was found the bones were five foot under the surface, belonging to an animal…and they were thousands of years old. Before the work began, Perkins and his husband had joked, “Oh great, maybe they will find a dinosaur for us and it will pay for our pool”.

Shortly after the discovery they contacted Joshua Bonde, Director of Research at the Nevada Science Centre, and he visited the site. Bonde predicted the bones had likely come from a large animal, potentially a horse, and could be up to 14,000 years old, dating from Earth’s most recent Ice Age.

“What we found was when they were excavating the backyard pool, they were cutting through ice age layers of sediment and sure enough they had a skeleton of an animal,” Perkins said.

The most recent Ice Age, the Pleistocene Epoch, began about 2.6 million years ago and lasted about 11,700 years. Since Earth formed, there have been at least five major Ice Ages documented in the last 4.6 billion years, and most likely many more before humankind inhabited the Earth. The Pleistocene Epoch is the first in which Homo Sapiens evolved, and by the end of the epoch humans could be found in nearly every part of the planet.

The couple are now working on a plan to have the bones removed and turned over to Bonde before the pool is constructed.