Why is there an Elephant Buried Beneath the Vatican?

Vatican sketch of an elephant from the school of Raphael, possibly after Hanno himself. Source: Ashmolean Museum / Public Domain.

In February 1962, a group of Italian workers were digging up the Belvedere Courtyard of the Vatican to modernize a cooling and heating system when they uncovered something totally unexpected: bone. They found four pieces of a giant jawbone and a large tooth at first, so large they thought it was a dinosaur bone.

But these were not fossilized bones: these were the remains of a creature that had died much more recently. To their surprise, the workers found that they were looking at the skeleton of an elephant, which had bafflingly been buried under the Vatican.