Nine-year-old Jude Sparks was hiking with his family in the desert of Las Cruces, New Mexico, last November testing walkie-talkies with his younger brothers when he tripped on something and fell. He thought it looked like petrified wood at first, but its shape seemed more animal than plant. Could it be that classic of desert art, the cow skull? That’s what his little brother Hunter thought. Jude’s parents thought it looked more elephant-like. They looked it up when they got home and none of the elephant skulls they found online matched the object Jude had stumbled on, so they emailed a photo of the find to Peter Houde, professor of biology at New Mexico State University (NMSU), in the hope he might be able to identify it.

Houde recognized it at a glance as the fossilized skull of a Stegomastodon, a large elephantine animal that roamed North America in the Pliocene era about five million to 28,000 years before the present. This particular specimen is approximately 1.2 million years old, and even though it’s from one of the more common species of extinct elephants that inhabited the area, as far as Houde knows it’s only the second complete Stegomastodon skull discovered in New Mexico.

Jude had tripped over one of its tusks and faceplanted in front of the lower mandible. He could see the second tusk a little ways away. It was an incredibly fortuitous stumble, because the fossil had only recently been exposed by heavy rains. Had it been exposed to the elements any longer, it would have crumbled to dust. Houde saw to it that the exposed fossils parts — the jaw and both tusks — were removed to NMSU’s Vertebrate Museum for their protection. After securing the permission of the landowner (the exact location of the find is being kept under wraps at his request) and the hardening chemicals necessary to preserve the fossil in situ, Peter Houde and a team of professors and students excavated the rest of the skull this May. The Sparks family was given the opportunity to join in the excavation, which is going to be hard to top as family excursions go.

Houde applauded the Sparks family’s decision to do the right thing in contacting him about their find. He encourages others who might come across fossils to reach out to an expert rather than try to dig it up on their own.

“As you can imagine, when people find out about these things, they might be tempted to go out there and see what they might find themselves and tear up the land or they might hurt themselves,” Houde said. “To be quite honest, all these fossils from this area are radioactive and especially for children, not something you would want in your home.”

Houde estimates the jaw weighs about 120 pounds and the entire skull as little as a ton. And while the skull may appear to be strong, it is quite delicate.

“The upper part of the skull is deceiving. It’s mostly hollow and the surface of the skull is eggshell thin,” Houde said. “You can imagine an extremely large skull would be very heavy for the animal if it didn’t have air inside it to lighten it up just like our own sinuses. That makes the thing extremely fragile and the only thing holding it together is the sediment surrounding it.

“In fact when the sediments are removed from the sides of them, they start to fall apart immediately and literally fall into tiny, tiny bits. It has to be done carefully by somebody who knows how to go about doing it. It is a very deliberate process that takes a little bit of time.”

The team spent a week excavating the skull, brushing it with the hardening chemicals to make it possible to remove it without damaging the delicate fossil. Once it was fully exposed, the skull was coated with a layer of plaster and reinforced with wood braces for support. It was raised by a tractor onto a flatbed truck and transported to New Mexico State University.

In the NMSU laboratory the skull will be studied, analyzed and reconstructed. The process is a painstaking one and it will likely take years before the complete skull is pieced back together and stabilized so it can be put on public display.

Archaeologists have discovered a rare Roman stone sarcophagus at an excavation on Swan Street and Harper Road in Southwark, central London. The coffin dates to the 4th century and was buried inside a mausoleum along the Roman road just outside ancient Londinium. It is filled with soil so archaeologists were not able to determine its contents at a glance, but because the bones of a baby from the same period were found buried next to the sarcophagus, it’s possible it contains the skeletal remains of a mother. There is no evidence at this point of any connection between the infant and the coffin burial.

Contractors Pre-Construct Archaeology were engaged to excavate the property where a court annex and sorting office once stood and on which the charitable organization Trinity House plans to build a new housing complex. Excavations began in January and were almost completed when the sarcophagus was discovered last month. Under the former court annex building, the team discovered a long trench that had been dug by looters hundreds of years ago around the perimeter of the sarcophagus. The lid had been slid open and there’s a large crack in it, likely the calling cards of the same looters who dug the trench.

The grave robbers found the sarcophagus in the post-Medieval period. They broke into it and helped themselves to grave goods. Archaeologists hope the looters limited themselves to stealing the more showily valuable objects — precious metals, fine pottery, jewelry — and left behind things they didn’t care about but archaeologists do. If they didn’t interfere with the human remains, that would be a great archaeological boon. The sarcophagus has been scanned with a metal detector which signalled the presence of metal inside the earth-packed coffin, so there’s almost certainly something in there.

The deceased must have been a very wealthy, high-status individual to receive such an expensive burial. The sarcophagus itself is extremely rare. Only two late Roman sarcophaguses have been found in their original burial context in London in recent memory. Then there’s the location on the main Roman road leading in and out of the city. This was a prestigious spot that would have been reserved for someone of great importance.

Recent archaeological research has shown that this area of Roman Southwark is the focus of ritual activity. We now know that this area forms a complex ritual landscape containing various religious and funerary monuments and a vast dispersed Roman cemetery (sites such as Dickens Square, Lant Street and Trinity Street) incorporating a range of burial practices, often with exotic grave goods sourced from across the Roman Empire. […]

Gillian King, Senior Planner: Archaeology, at Southwark Council, said: “In my long archaeological career I have excavated many hundreds of burials, but this is the first Roman sarcophagus I have ever discovered, still surviving in its original place of deposition. I have seen them in museums, but I think part of me believed that they had probably all been found by now!

“It really is a very special discovery. Personally, I find it really fascinating to contemplate that this area – which we are now so familiar with – was once, during the Roman period, so completely different.”

The sarcophagus and lid were raised on Tuesday and transported to the Hackney archive of the Museum of London where it will be painstakingly excavated in laboratory conditions. Any bones or artifacts found within will be analyzed and tested to confirm the date of the burial.