Artifacts found in Pinellas County

ST. PETERSBURG - A Pinellas County worker stumbled upon an interesting find. What looked like rocks, turned out to be bones thousands of years old.

"One of them was a toe bone of a prehistoric horse," Alfonso Riley said of his discovery.

It all started at Redington Shores Yacht and Tennis Club. Riley, a utilities worker, was installing a water meter, when he simply looked down.

"I looked at it and I'm saying to myself 'this looks like a fossil.' I showed it to one of the guys I work with and he was like 'nah, that looks like a rock,'" Riley said.

Riley found more and took them to Dr. Randy Bellomo, who also works for the county. He's an archeologist and teaches anthropology at St. Petersburg College. He thinks the fossils date back 12,000 - 18,000 years to the Ice Age.

"I knew it was vertebrate, non-human, and I turned it over to the experts that deal with vertebrate paleontology," Dr. Bellomo said.

Riley emailed photographs of what he found to the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville. They confirmed his suspicions.

"In the humans, it's sort of equivalent to this middle bone of the finger," said Vertebrate Paleontology Collection Manager Richard Hulbert of the horse toe bone.

Hulburt identified the fossils. He says one was the shell of a giant armadillo, five times bigger than the armadillo today.

"These animals along with mammoths and mastodons and sloths and giant wolves and large cats were all living in Florida, and periodically they would die and their bones got incorporated into the sediments," Hulbert said.

He says the discovery is not groundbreaking. Similar fossils have been found before, but never by Alfonso. For him, it's a new hobby. At a water leak, he stumbled upon something else.

"It's a 50 caliber from a helicopter in World War II," he said.

He's holding on to his ancient findings for now. He says he may donate them or have them researched further.

"It's funny to have something that old in your hands, something that was here so many years ago, even before humans existed," Riley told FOX 13.

He says science was always his best subject.