That’s one heck of a snag! A family in Michigan decided to move a swimming platform in the small lake off its backyard. When something got stuck on its anchor, they thought it was tree branches or something else. It turned up being a set of elk antlers most likely from an extinct species dating back approximately 220 years.
“We’re all kind of shocked. It’s amazing that this thing survived that long down at the bottom of the lake and that we snagged it with an anchor line – just some random happenstance – and dragged it out,” Michael Bleau told mlive.com. “It’s a big, huge, monstrous thing – what else is out there?”
It happened in Sullivan Lake about 60 miles west of Detroit in southern Michigan.
The Cranbrook Institute of Science located in nearby Bloomfield Hills utilized its radiocarbon dating lab to determine the age of the antlers. The lab’s director maintains the antlers belong to the extinct Eastern elk species.
(Photo source: Cranbrook Institute of Science)