Those cheers of excitement you’re hearing in the distance are from the school’s science department.

WBUR reported.

A Mammoth Find At Oregon State University Football Field

Workers were in for a big surprise as they dug beneath the north end zone of Oregon State University’s football stadium this week. A crew member uncovered a 5-foot-long femur bone, believed to be from an ice age mammoth.

Loren Davis, an associate professor of anthropology at OSU, was called to the field to examine the femur and other bones. He tells Here & Now‘s Meghna Chakrabarti what these bones can tell us about the environment thousands of years ago.

Interview Highlights: Loren Davis

On what getting the news was like

“Well, I got a phone call in my office from the construction manager here at Oregon State University. And I get calls like these every once in a while, maybe once a year. Most of the time, they end up not being anything, like a farmer buried a cow a long time ago or something. So I was a little skeptical, but when I went over there, yep, for sure it was not a cow.”

On what he found when he first got onsite

“When we first got there to work there were three bones exposed and they were basically part of the shoulder assembly. And then as we kept working with the equipment operators, who did such a great job, we began to reveal other bones so we went very slowly and we found the very end of a femur, a thigh bone, and it kept going and going and going and we were very pleased to see that it was intact.”