Chūrui Naumann Elephant Museum

The Chūrui Naumann Elephant Museum (忠類ナウマン象記念館) opened in Makubetsu, Hokkaidō, Japan in 1988. It commemorates the chance discovery of a fossilized Naumann's elephant in Chūrui, now Makubetsu, on 26 July 1969, during construction work on a farm road: the youth who unearthed the initial piece with his pickaxe crying out "this is an elephant's tooth" (「これは象の歯だ」). During the course of three subsequent excavations, some forty-seven bones were recovered, representing 70–80% of the total skeleton. Twenty-two museums in Japan and the rest of the world now house the reconstructed elephant's remains from the Chrui finds.