MAYVILLE, N.D. -- A once-in-a-lifetime discovery in rural North Dakota. The fossil remnants of an ancient sea monster.

There are many remnants of the ancient past inside Mayville State University: Ammonites, baculites, even the tooth of a Tyrannosaurus.

However, the recent discovery by Jay Anderson of Steele County, N.D., stands out among the collection.

While working in the gravel pit on his property, he brought in heavy equipment to break up a massive boulder.

"Looked at the rock, and I seen it was something wrong, and I got out, and here it was, this, you know, fossil. And I knew that was something pretty big," Anderson said.

So he brought the pieces to Michael Kjelland, an associate professor of biology at Mayville State University.

"I looked at them like, 'Wow, this is neat.' This is, you know, warrants a trip out to the site," Kjelland said.

He knew it was old, but even he was surprised by how old.

"I was thinking Cretaceous period, because here we have the pure shale, which is Cretaceous, but it actually goes back to the Ordovician period. So it's roughly 444 million years or more, 486," Kjelland said.

An artistic rendering can guess what the ancient sea monster looked like. It's a long extinct apex predator, a cephalopod, and an Endoceras specimen. Nothing like it exists today, but it might have resembled a giant squid with a shell.

"The shelled Kraken!" Kjelland exclaimed.

How did this ancient sea monster make its way to the Peace Garden State, not exactly known for oceanic life -- 400-plus million years is a long time. Kjelland's best guess?

"It could be that a glacier brought it in, deposited there, was covered up as the glacier melted back and swept off all the debris," he said.

Questions still remain about the discovery, and there could be more discoveries to come.

Some of these fragments of the fossil at the museum are actually from the original boulder, where they found the fossil remnants. In spring, Mayville students are going to come out and look for some more at the site.

Count on Anderson's daughter, Madison, a Mayville State student, to be there.

"It's crazy that my dad just found it and it ended up being something that, I mean, was totally cool and millions and millions of years old," she said.

Where there's one fossil, there could be more.

"Look at rocks. Flip them over. See what's on the other side. Because you never know this might be in your backyard," Anderson says.

Believe it or not, it's not actually the first time an ancient cephalopod has been discovered in North Dakota.