We dug up a mastadon in a peat bog in north central IN about 40 years ago. Landowner gave it to Bethel College. Turned out to be a female and a calf when they excavated the rest of the remains.
I kept a femur, a rib and a vertebra.
I’ve read that early explorers often found bones like these lying on the ground in Kentucky.
I have an old book THE DEFEAT OF JOHN HAWKINS in which, after the Spanish destroy most of his fleet, he lets what is left of the men ashore near modern day Tampico, Mexico.
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/bayner-unwin/the-defeat-of-john-hawkins/
“Plagued with troubles from the first, Hawkins, slave-decks filled, managed to reach New Spain and to sell most of his slaves, but at San Juan de Ulua, near the present Vera Cruz, was attacked and defeated by the Spanish and most of his men captured, to be later sold as galley-slaves or turned over to the Inquisition as heretics.
Hawkins and Drake and a few others reached England; three other men were picked up eleven months later by a fishing vessel on the Nova Scotian coast; how they got there is today unknown.”
They claimed they traveled overland and saw herds of ELEPHANTS in the interior or what is today the USA.