A European dentist who’s seen his share of jawbones got a stunning surprise earlier this month when he spotted a mandible in a highly unlikely place—embedded in the newly installed tile floor at his parents’ home., curious and enthused paleontologists the world over have contacted him. An international team of scientists now plans to study the fossil, which they suspect belongs to an extinct member of the human lineage.
The European dentist, who specializes in dental implants, says he immediately knew he wasn’t just looking at tile’s natural pattern variations when he saw chompers staring up at him. “It is very, very unusual to find vertebrate fossils in processed travertine tile, and hominin fossils 100 times more so,” Kappelman said. “We have only a handful.” Kappelman was part of a team that found theetched on 500-year-old human skeletal remains discovered by factory workers in Turkey cutting travertine rock for commercial use.