Excavator driver John Rutherford was on a routine shift at a riverside pit in Northumberland when he unearthed the incredible bones with his digger.
They belonged to a species of wild cattle called an auroch, that had roamed Britain more than 7,500 years ago.
Aurochs stood 6ft at the shoulder and became extinct in the UK around 4,000 years ago.
The skull has been radiocarbon dated to 5670-5520 BC, when northern Britain would have been sparsely occupied by mobile groups of hunter and gatherer peoples.
Two red deer antlers were also found in the same area as the auroch skull and one produced a similar radiocarbon date.
The startling discovery was made at Thompsons of Prudhoe's Haughton Strother quarry near Humshaugh.
'If the excavator bucket had been 10 centimetres either side it would have smashed the skull,' said Robin Taylor-Wilson, director of Durham-based Pre-Construct Archaeology, who advise Thompson's of Prudhoe.
'It is very rare to find a complete auroch skull, but it came out hanging off the bucket from a wet area as if it was meant to be.
'The find is of an animal which lived thousands of years before that, and one which would have been a prize capture for dinner for the hunter gatherers of the time.'
It is now hoped that the skull will go on show at the Great North Museum in Newcastle.
Ryan Molloy, development and environmental manager at Thompsons of Prudhoe, said: 'The way the skull came out in perfect condition was unbelievable.
'It is a wet working quarry and the skull had been preserved in a peat pocket for 7,000 years.
'Normally, only fragments of bone are found from this time, so to get a skull in such pristine condition was incredible, and a lot of credit has to go to the driver who immediately reported it.'
Nick Best, assistant Northumberland county archaeologist, said: 'We thought there might be the potential of finding something there as the river would attract animals and people. The skull is an important discovery.'
He added that among the factors believed to be behind the extinction of aurochs in the Bronze Age were the clearance of their woodland habitat by people and hunting.
Archaeological monitoring was part of the planning conditions the authorities imposed on the quarry, which has been worked for the last three years.
Aurochs may be the ancestors of Northumberland's Chillingham white cattle.
'This a very interesting find,' said Philip Deakin, chairman of the Chillingham Wild Cattle Association.
The Chillingham herd now stands at a record 90, with another 30 in the reserve herd in Scotland.
Aurochs were much larger than modern cattle. Bulls had long horns which pointed forwards rather than swept out to the side. Ancient Greek and Roman writers describe the aurochs as a very aggressive animal.
In the 1920s two German zoo directors Heinz and Lutz Heck tried to bring aurochs back through a selective breeding program using domestic cattle descendants.
They believed a species was not 'extinct' as long as all its genes were still present in a living population. The resulting breed was called 'Heck cattle' or 'Recreated Aurochs' and though impressive they did not reach the same stature as their ancestors.
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