Palaeontologists have uncovered the rare fossil of a 7.5-million-year-old species of mammoth in Turkey’s central Kayseri province, Turkish news agency DHA reported on Thursday.

The discovery was made at a dig near the Yamula Dam, where a shepherd found a large fossil last year in September.

The fossil unveiled this week belongs to the extinct Choerolophodon species of mammoth, and is the first intact discovery of a large portion of the animal, Kayseri Mayor Memduh Büyükkılıç told reporters.

“It’s regarded as the ancestor of our modern-day elephants. This goes down as the first time in world history that the skull and lower jaw have been found in one piece”, he said.

The excavation site in Kayseri has reportedly turned up many more mammoth fossils, and work at the site is expected to continue for 30 years, DHA reported.

“Scientists from Germany and Finland want to come to Kayseri to see the fossils we’ve discovered at the dig”, DHA quoted Okşan Başoğlu, an archaeologist at Ankara’s Hacı Bayram Veli University, as saying.

“It seems this region bears many more surprises to come”, Başoğlu said.