Michigan Boy Accidentally Finds 10,000-year-old Mastodon Tooth

A 9-year-old Michigan boy accidentally stumbled upon a 10,000-year-old extinct Mastodon tooth, offering an insight into North America's Prehistoric past.

With this find, the young boy Philip Stoll from Lansing, Mich., has taken a major leap toward his dream of becoming a paleontologist.

The tooth belongs to Mastodon, extinct elephant like beasts that roamed North America nearly 10,000 years ago. It was accidentally found by Stoll during his stroll at the Creek last summer.  Unaware that the bizarre object was indeed a 10,000 year-old mastodon tooth, Stoll picked up the 8 inches long brown object.

"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, Philip Stoll's mother, told CNN. "It looked like a tooth. It looked like there was something like gum tissue, a little bulgy thing around the top."

Fondly known as 'Huckleberry Phil' in his neighborhood, Stoll and his mom frantically started searching the net to seek more details of the bizarre object and finally approached Jim Harding, a Michigan State University Herpetologists and Wildlife Outreach Specialist for the Department of Zoology and MSU Museum.

Analyzing the picture sent by Stoll and his mother, Harding confirmed that the object was the top portion of a tooth of a Mastodon and may have broken off at some point, according to The Times Herald.

According to Harding, Mastodon bones are unearthed every three to four years in Michigan. 

"It is a great reminder of what used to roam the country," he said. "It most likely got stuck in a swampy area and drowned."

Similar to mammoths and elephants in their appearance, the mastodons disappeared from North America as a part of mass extinction mainly due to human hunting.