Emanuel Manis ran a mink farm.

In 1977, he was using a backhoe to dig a pond on his property near Sequim, Washington — a small town on the drier northeastern side of the Olympic Peninsula, somewhat anomalously positioned in a rain shadow that makes it one of the less wet corners of an extremely wet landscape.

The backhoe hit bone.

Manis stopped.

What he had uncovered was clearly significant — the size of the bones alone was enough to indicate that this was no ordinary animal.

He contacted authorities, and the find eventually came to the attention of Carl Gustafson, an archaeologist at Washington State University who had been surveying the region for prehistoric sites.