Man finds mastodon bone on canoe trip

CINCINNATI, Sept. 4 (UPI) -- A Kentucky man who joked to his girlfriend about finding a dinosaur bone in a river discovered weeks later that what he had was, in fact, a mastodon bone.

David Boyers of Highland Heights and Amanda Plummer were canoeing on the Licking River when he spotted the bone. He thought it was just a log, but he took it home because of the unusual shape, the Cincinnati Post reported.

A few days later, he noticed the log appeared to have bone marrow. He took it to a museum in Covington, Ky., where he was referred to the Cincinnati Museum Center.

Glenn Storrs of the Cincinnati museum says that the log is actually part of the ulna of a mastodon that lived in the area about 20,000 years ago. The huge animals, related to elephants, are long extinct.

"I've been on that river since I was 5 or 6," Boyers said. "It's amazing that I'm now 37 and run across this."

He donated the bone to the museum where it can be stored in climate-controlled conditions.