Crew installing pool at Las Vegas home finds ice age animal bones

April 29 (UPI) -- A Las Vegas couple said workers digging behind their home for a pool installation made a surprising discovery: a set of bones that could be up to 14,000 years old.

Matt Perkins, who recently moved to Las Vegas with his husband, said they woke up Monday morning to find Las Vegas police officers were speaking with the workers digging out the hole for their backyard pool.

"It kind of freaked us out," Perkins told the Las Vegas Review-Journal of learning the workers had found buried bones.

Perkins said his mind was eased when the police determined the bones, found about 4-5 feet under the surface, were not from a human -- and were likely thousands of years old.

"We had joked on Friday that while they started digging, 'Oh great maybe they will find a dinosaur for us and it will pay for our pool,'" Perkins told KTNV-TV.

Perkins and his husband contacted Joshua Bonde, director of research at the Nevada Science Center, and he visited the site Tuesday.

Bonde said the bones likely came from a horse or other large animal. He said the bones could be up to 14,000 years old -- dating from the 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.

Perkins said he is now working on a plan to have the bones removed and turned over to Bonde before the concrete is poured for the pool.