They finally traced the call.

For the last three decades, no one knew why bits and pieces of plastic, orange Garfield the Cat telephones were turning up along a 15-mile stretch of France’s Brittany coast beach.

Mystery solved. This week, the French environmental action group #AlertePollution discovered a shipping container full of the phones, circa 1980, in a cave. Due to the tide, the cave is only accessible a few days of the year, which made tracing the phones’ source that much harder.

“It’s like any treasure hunt,” #AlertePollution president Claire Simonin-Le Meur told French news site France.info.

As bizarre as it’s been to find bits of a cartoon feline phone washing up along the shoreline for 30 years, the French environmentalist was not amused at the extent to which marine life has been polluted by plastic.

Still a mystery is how that shipping container got there. And no, Garfield fans: There was no sign of his beloved lasagna.