A little boy from Michigan has found what most little boys his age only dream of finding, a 10,000 year old tooth from an ancient and extinct animal. The boy found a strange looking rock while walking along a creek and experts have confirmed that the mysterious object was a mastodon tooth.
The Michigan boy named Phillip Stoll found the tooth summer last year. Young Phillip has been called "Huckleberry Phil" by his neighbors due to the boy's love for exploring the great outdoors. At the tender age of 9, Phillip now has a legitimate paleontological discovery under his belt.
"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," said Philip during an interview with CNN.
The strange object was approximately 8 inches long with odd looking points, something that intrigued Phillip and his mother Heidi Stoll.
"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," Heide Stoll said. "It looked like a tooth. It looked like there was something like gum tissue, a little bulgy thing around the top."
Growing more curious about Philip's find, the Stolls tried searching the Internet for some answers looking for more information about a "large tooth object." The pair eventually contacted a herpetologist named James Harding to help identify the object. While Harding was an expert on amphibians and reptiles, the biologist was still able to identify the mysterious object as a mastodon tooth. Harding said that the object found by the Stolls was the upper part of a mastodon tooth, which may have broken off from the root sometime during its long history.
Mastodons are closely related to modern elephants. The extinct genus roamed the lands of North and Central American thousands of years ago. Mastodons first appeared sometime during the late Miocene or the late Pliocene but they became extinct around 10,000 to 11,000 years ago. The genus became extinct during a mass extinction event, which may have been caused by a sudden and rapid change in climate.
Like their modern relatives, mastodons lived together in herds and the species survived while browsing and grazing throughout America. Among all of the species included in the Mammut genus, the American Mastodon is the most well known.
