MIAMI -- You wouldn't know dinosaurs once roamed around Miami's Brickell Avenue. But according to one homeowner, they're buried deep underneath his yard.

It's ancient history nestled in a landscape of concrete and high-rise buildings.

"People come from all over to see these fossils because they're very rare. No one has fossils like these," said Ishmael Golden Eagle, whose family owned the property for decades.

Eagle led a Local 10 news crew through his tree-shaded yard, which he believed was once an ancient site, millions of years before Earth's plates shifted and the continents were formed.

"It's been excavated. And it's a formation of prehistoric animals," he said.

For Eagle, the dig started as a childhood quest for fresh water during the Cold War, prompted by fears that Fidel Castro had poisoned the water supply.

But he started finding what looked like skulls, animals and parts of religious temples.

"This is the neck, the spine, the back, the pelvis, the ribcage," he told Local 10's Janine Stanwood while holding the remains of one of his findings.

Ten years later, he found a stone cork, and what he said is sacred water.

Forty years later, he had excavated his whole yard by hand.

"We don't even know how to study this yet," said Burke Keogh, who also lives at the house.

Experts said some of the artifacts are from the Tequesta Indians and at least 2,000 years old. Eagle believes the fossils on his property are at least 2 million years old.

"This is our history," he said.

Now he just wants people to see the site, and for the scientific community to confirm what he already believes: That it is a sacred piece of Miami's ancient past.