Watch this badger spend 5 days burying a 51-pound cow

They say you can accomplish anything if you set your mind to it, although often that is much easier said than done. But whenever a task seems insurmountable, just think of the steady determination of this 24-pound badger burying a 51-pound cow calf in the desert:

Badgers are known to bury the carcasses of dead animals for later meals, but this recently recorded instance marks the largest animal researchers have ever seen one of the omnivores entomb. To get the 51-pound cow entirely underground, the badger spent five entire days working to dig the hole and fill it in again.

"We know a lot about badgers morphologically and genetically, but behaviorally there's a lot of blank spaces that need to be filled," said University of Utah senior Ethan Frehner, who helped document the event in Utah's Great Basin Desert. "This is a substantial behavior that wasn't at all known about."

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Watch the time-lapse below and read more about the badger at Phys.org. Jeva Lange