Chūrui Naumann Elephant Museum
Japan · Asia
About
The Chūrui Naumann Elephant Museum (Chūrui Nauman-zō Kinenkan) opened in Makubetsu, Hokkaidō, Japan in 1988. It commemorates the chance discovery of a fossilized Naumann's elephant in Chūrui, now Makubetsu, on 26 July 1969, during construction work on a farm road: the youth who unearthed the initial piece with his pickaxe crying out "this is an elephant's tooth". During the course of three subsequent excavations, some forty-seven bones were recovered, representing 70–80% of the total skeleton. Twenty-two museums in Japan and the rest of the world now house the reconstructed elephant's remains from the Chrui finds.
Adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA). Photography via Wikimedia Commons.