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Bachelor Party’s Accidental Discovery of Ancient Stegomastodon Skull
A bachelor party at Elephant Butte Lake turned into a major science find in June 2014. Antonio Gradillas and friends spotted a tusk poking from the sand while helping a stuck driver.
They dug up what they thought was a mammoth skull. Soon after, expert Gary Morgan spent six hours pulling the massive fossil from lake silt.
The find was pure luck – the lake had been drained just two weeks earlier for farm water. The 1,000-pound skull came from a stegomastodon, a nine-foot-tall elephant cousin that died 3.2 million years ago at age 50…