Million-Year-Old Mammoth Tusks Unearthed During Roadwork (Video)

A pair of mammoth tusks discovered in Austria are estimated to be around a million years old.

According to The Local Austria, the find was made as a crew conducted roadwork in mid-August. Experts were then called to the site, and they carefully covered the artifacts in plaster and transported them back to the Natural History Museum in Vienna.

As one museum paleontologist told the BBC, “Above all, we have to prevent the bones from drying out, otherwise they quickly become fragile.”

The team has since determined that the tusks are more than eight-feet long and possibly belong to a member of a rare species that predates even the woolly mammoth. The plan is to preserve then analyze the remains and search for other objects around the discovery site.