Dispatch: in 1986 quarry workers showed a dog walker a huge bone. She phoned a museum. It turned out to be Britain's most complete mammoth.

Dispatch, we have a phone call that rewrote part of the Ice Age. On Sept. 27, 1986, quarry workers at a gravel pit near Condover, Shropshire, uncovered the remains of five mammoths, BBC News reports as the find turns 40. At first the bones were thought to possibly belong to a shire horse or even a circus elephant. Eve Roberts, now 88, was walking her dogs with her husband, Glyn, near the quarry when workers showed them one of the unusually large bones. "These were on a spoil heap on the Saturday morning and we both felt this wasn't normal due to the size of them," she said. "So we came home and we rang the museum people, it was the Ludlow curator we spoke to at first." Her actions proved pivotal. Prof. Adrian Lister, who was 31 when he was called in, said the call was "absolutely critical." The workmen thought the bones came from a horse, he said: "So they would have just been left or crushed, or who knows what." When Lister later published a book about mammoths, he signed her copy "To Eve, who started it all." The haul included the most complete adult mammoth skeleton found in Britain, a male aged around 30 to 32, plus four juveniles that later research showed were not a family. Radiocarbon dating placed the animals at about 14,000 years old. Before Condover, scientists believed mammoths had disappeared from Britain about 18,000 to 19,000 years ago. Experts think the animals were drawn to vegetation around a muddy "kettle hole" left by retreating ice, then became trapped. Roberts took time off work to help with the digs and treat the bones. "Up until then I hadn't got a clue about anything to do with that sort of thing," she said. Most of the original bones are held at Ludlow, and some are displayed at Shrewsbury Museum. Five mammoths and a few thousand years of history, all because somebody decided a very large bone deserved a phone call. Over.