WORKERS digging up a busy street in the Mexican city of Tultepec have delighted paleontologists with a mammoth find — literally!

    The skeleton of the long-extinct behemoth — which experts believe grew to 16 feet (4.8 meters) tall and weighed as much as 10 tons — was found while workers were carrying out drainage work in the city’s suburb of San Antonio Xahuento.

    Experts say the beast died on that spot 12,000 to 14,000 years ago, and remained there while civilization sprouted up just 6.5 feet (1.98 meters) above it, The Telegraph reported.

    Work began on the site in April, and the creature’s 0.9-meter-wide head (complete with curved tusks) has now been almost completely removed from the soil, as has its pelvis.

    That’s not a quick process at all, as tens of thousands of years of dirt must be carefully removed from each bone to ensure that it remains as intact as possible.

    Experts also found other bones, including ribs, leg bones and vertebrae, and believe that their placement reveals the beast met a grisly fate after it had already died.

    Paleontologist Luis Cordoba Barradas said in a statement that “the specimen may have been partially cut up by a human group.”

    They would have then taken its meat and pelt. It was 20-25 years old when it died.

    That would have occurred, experts believe, after the heavy beast became trapped in mud; animals are also thought to have taken apart the body after its death.

    The creature belonged to the species Mammuthus Columbi, a North and Central American mammoth that has been found across the continent, with many examples having already been found in Mexico.

    According to Luis Cordoba, an archaeologist with the National Institute of Anthropology and History, the remains of more than 50 mammoths have been found in the area around Mexico City.(SD-Agencies)