US farmer finds woolly mammoth skeleton

Washington, June 6 (IANS) A farmer in America's Iowa state has found an entire skeleton of a wooly mammoth, a 14,000-year-old elephant-like creature from the ice age.

The man, known only as John, excavated the fossils two years ago from his backyard in Oskaloosa, the Daily Mail reported.

He has all kinds of bones cluttered around his house, and the most impressive is a five-foot-long femur.

Woolly mammoths were hairy relatives of African elephants, and were roughly the same size -- up to 13 feet tall.

John and his sons kept their find a secret for two years. As the excavation site got deeper, John invited Holmes Semken, a retired professor of vertebrate paleontology from the University of Iowa.

Semken said the archaeological site gives important clues about what life was like in Iowa during the Ice Age.