Phillip Stoll was out walking along a creek last summer when he saw what he thought was a really cool-looking rock. It was about eight inches long and had six weird-looking peaks on it.
“It felt weird,” the boy told the Lansing State Journal. “I had to see what it was. I pulled it out and brought it to my mom.”
He brought it home and tested it to see if it was magnetic. It wasn’t, but after Phil and his mom showed it to researchers at Michigan State, they learned that the object was pretty special.
“This is indeed a mastodon tooth,” Professor James Harding confirmed in an e-mail, according to CNN. “Apparently (it is) the upper surface, broken off at the roots.”
Mastodons were prehistoric, elephant-like creatures that lived in North American about 10,000 years ago.
Phil told CNN that he’d like to be a paleontologist when he grows up.
This isn’t the first time adventurous boys have run across ancient bones in Michigan. In June 2012, two 11-year-olds searching for crayfish in a Shelby Township stream found a mastodon axis bone instead.
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