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A Florida man has discovered the remains of a prehistoric monster that may be 10 million years old.

Alex Lundberg, 29, was diving with a friend near Venice Beach when he retrieved a four-foot mastodon tusk from 25 feet below the surface.

The tusk turned out to be from a mastodon — a distant relative of the woolly mammoth — that lived 10 million years ago, Lundberg said.

An expert from the Bradenton’s Bishop Museum of Science and Nature confirmed the discovery, which is considered “super rare” as only prehistoric shark teeth and broken pieces of mammoth tusks are usually found in the area.

Lundberg will have to report his findings to the Florida Museum of Natural History to determine if they have any scientific value.

Mastodon tusks, which are usually just a few inches long, sell for as little as $20 to $350, but Lundberg speculates that his 60-pound tusk is worth about $5,000.

The part-time diver and fossil hunter said it was surreal that the mastodon’s tusk had not disintegrated when he pulled it from the seabed.

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“When I first saw it, I only saw a small strip exposed in the sand,” Lundberg told DailyMail.com.

“When I started spreading the sand, I saw the cross section of it and realized it was a full tusk.

“We made a sling out of a beach towel and kind of hoisted it over the side of the boat,” he continued.

“It’s absolutely surreal that it came out in one piece and didn’t disintegrate at all.”

Lundberg has been searching for fossils near Venice Beach for five years, where the area is known for thousands of fossilized shark teeth estimated to be approximately 10 million years old.

However, he estimated that “the tusk is between 10,000 and 500,000 years old based on other fossils we have recovered from this area.”

Speaking about the tusk, Lundberg told the Tampa Bay News, “It’s a once in a lifetime thing, I’m told.”

Mastodons are an extinct relative of modern elephants that were widespread in North America until about 10,000 years ago.

The fossils are usually found in well-preserved deposits of the Pliocene epoch from 5.4 to 2.4 million years ago and the subsequent Pleistocene epoch, which lasted from 2.5 to 11,000 years ago.

Mastodon fossils, including tusks, bones and skulls, are common in only four US states: Indiana, Colorado, California and New York – making its occurrence in Florida incredibly unusual.

There are only about a dozen complete mastodon skeletons that have been found in Florida, compared to more than 140 in New York state alone.

Lundberg said it may have taken so long to find the fossil because Florida’s coastline has changed since the Pleistocene era.

“The sand is constantly shifting and exposing and covering new areas. Especially after a cold front and big storms,” he said.

“We’ve been looking for this place for years and we got lucky today.”

“All paleontologists are looking for this kind of rough diamond,” Hunter Windham, education specialist at the Bishop Museum of Science and Nature in Bradenton, told Tampa Bay.

“The great thing about Florida, especially if you’re looking for animals that were around during the last ice age, is that the coastline extends much farther than it does today. So these animals have walked over land up to 50 or 60 miles to the Gulf of Mexico from where we are today,” he added.

Lundberg will have to share his findings with the Florida Museum of Natural History after his permit to collect fossils in Florida expires in six months.

At that time, the museum will decide if the tusk is scientifically significant or if he can keep it, but he remains hopeful it can stay in his family.

“It’s just been rolling around on the ocean floor for at least the last 10 million years,” he told USA Today.

“Its scientific value is limited, it’s just a cooler display at this point.”

In a separate interview, Lundberg told Tampa Bay, “I told my girlfriend that this tusk is going to go to our kids and grandkids, and it’s already a family tusk. It’s part of the family.