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Gregory Harpel, an amateur fossil hunter, came across what he first thought was an oddly shaped rock in New Jersey. Upon closer examination, the object turned out to be the missing half of a giant dinosaur-era sea turtle’s humerus bone.

When Harpel brought the bone to David Parris at the New Jersey State Museum, Parris recalled having seen a similar broken sea turtle bone at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University in Philadelphia. Half jokingly, he suggested that they bring the newly discovered bone to Philadelphia to see if the two pieces fit. To everyone’s astonishment, the pieces fit together almost perfectly.

The bone fragment at the Academy in Philadelphia has been there since at least 1849, meaning that the first half was discovered at least 163 years before the second half. Now that paleontologists have both pieces of the turtle’s forelimb bone, they are able to estimate more exactly what the animal might have looked like.

Read more here and see images.