A SET of bones that was found during the hunt for a meteorite could turn out to be the remains of a 120,000-year-old Ice Age bobcat.

    The remarkable find was made by a man searching in his son’s back garden in Riverside, California, the U.S., using a pair of home-made dousing rods — assembled out of coat hangers.

    A palaeontologist from the University of California, Riverside is now planning to excavate the remains to see exactly what the fossil is.

    Gary Braithwaite, 65, said his son was digging in hope of finding a meteorite, thinking a piece of metal was buried in his back garden.

    Braithwaite had been showing his son how to locate his sprinklers using a dowsing rod — which he constructed from two wire hangers.

    They felt a twitch in the rod, known as an “anomaly.”

    “He was walking around and found an anomaly,” Braithwaite told Southern California News, “And then he found another.”

    They decided to dig in search of metal, thinking it was some kind of meteorite.

    About four feet (1.3 meters) down one hole, Braithwaite found what looked like bones.

    Archaeologists have said the bones could possibly be a bobcat from the Ice Age.

    “It was an absolute bizarre lucky find,” he said.(SD-Agencies)