A GROUP of friends on a stag party made an unlikely discovery while out walking on a beach in New Mexico, the U.S. — a perfectly preserved 3-million-year-old elephant skull.

    The party was on a hike in Elephant Butte Lake State Park near Albuquerque when they spotted what looked like a bone emerging from the sand.

    The friends began digging until the skull surfaced.

    Antonia Gradillas, 33, who was out with the group celebrating a friend’s upcoming wedding when they made the find earlier this month, said: “As we were walking we saw a bone sticking out about one or two inches (2 to 5 cm) from the ground.”

    They thought they had found a woolly mammoth and sent photographs they took of it to the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science.

    As it turned out, they were not too far off. The skull was found to belong to a stegomastodon — a prehistoric ancestor of today’s elephants and one much older than the woolly mammoth, which dates back to the Ice Age.

    An archaeology group went down to the beach and packaged the skull, which weighs more than 454 kg, in a cast before transporting it to the museum, where it will be studied and eventually put on display.

    Mastodons — relatives of the elephant — stood 3 meters tall and migrated to North America around 15 million years ago, before becoming extinct about 10,000 years ago.  (SD-Agencies)