He may or may not be an aspiring paleontologist, but nine-year-old Philip Stoll uncovered an ancient Mastodon tooth near his home in Windsor Township, Mich.
According to CNN, Stoll dug up the artifact near a creak behind his house and took it inside for closer examination. He washed it off in the sink and checked to see if it was magnetic. It was not. It was brown, eight inches and had six points.
"I was walking down at the creek last summer. I felt something that I stepped on so I picked it up and everybody in the neighborhood thought it was pretty cool," the young boy told CNN.
Before Philip did his research, his mother said she had a strong premonition when holding the mysterious-looking thing.
"I was holding it in my hands for a few minutes and then it gave me the creeps so I put it down on the desk," Heidi Stoll told CNN. "It looked like a tooth. It looked like there was something like gum tissue, a little bulgy thing around the top."
Stoll figured it had to be a tooth of some kind, so he contacted a herpetologist named James Harding at Michigan State University. An expert on reptiles and amphibians, Harding confirmed to Stoll via email the object was the tooth of a Mastodon and was about 10,000 years old, the Detroit Free Press reported.
"These were elephant-sized beasts that roamed through Michigan over 10,000 years ago," Harding said. "They would look like a hairy elephant if you saw one today."
The MSU herpetologist said Mastodon bones turn up in the Lansing area every few years. In 2012, two boys found an axis bone while fishing in Shelby Township and bones have been recovered around Williamston and Fowlerville years before that.
"It's really neat how it looks like a giant tooth," Phillip told the DFP. "It was fun trying to figure out what it was. My mom was surprised."
