A hungry badger looking for food in a cave found a trove of ancient Roman coins instead

A badger helped archaeologists uncover a trove of more than 200 Roman-era coins concealed in a cave in Spain for centuries.

The coins were found in April 2021 in La Cuesta cave in the Asturias region in northern Spain, according to a paper published last month in the Journal of Prehistory and Archaeology, published by Madrid's Autonomous University.

A badger looking for food may have dug up some of the coins after a snowstorm that hit Spain last year, according to the research. The animal left the coins near its nest, before a man, identified as Roberto García, discovered the artifacts.

García alerted a team of archaeologists, including Alfonso Fanjul, who led the dig for the coins.

"We were shocked to find 90 coins just in the floor outside a nest of a badger," Fanjul told USA TODAY. "We didn't know how many could be underground or even if we could find more valuable objects."

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The researchers uncovered 209 coins, dating back to 200 to 400 A.D. Most of the coins were forged in the Mediterranean, the newspaper El País reported. At least one of the most well-preserved coins came from London.

Fanjul told USA TODAY that he and a group of volunteers and students plan to organize other excavations in the area.

He told CNN that refugees may have hidden the coins during the late Roman period.

"We think it's a reflection of the social and political instability which came along with the fall of Rome and the arrival of groups of barbarians to northern Spain,” he said.

The coins will be cleaned and displayed at the Archaeological Museum of Asturias.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Spain: Badger leads archaeologists to hundreds of Roman coins in cave