Nine-year-old Philip Stoll of Michigan is known as "Huckleberry Phil" in his neighborhood because of his love of exploration, something that paid off when the boy found an ancient mastodon tooth in a nearby creek.
"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," Philip told CNN on Friday.
He took the peculiar object home, washed it off and showed it to his mother, Heidi Stoll. The thing that turned out to be a mastodon tooth was around 8 inches long and had six pointed peaks.
"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."
She did some Internet searching and found pictures of a Mastodon tooth that seemed to be a match, the Detroit Free Press reported.
The family later reached out to Jim Harding, a Michigan State University herpetologist and wildlife outreach specialist for the Department of Zoology and MSU Museum, who confirmed after seeing a photo that the find was indeed the tooth of an ancient mastodon.
The hairy, elephant-like animals walked the area thousands of years ago, leaving bones that people find from time to time, Harding said.
"It is a great reminder of what used to roam the country," he said, according to the Free Press. "It most likely got stuck in a swampy area and drowned."
As for Philip, he is more convinced than ever that he should be a paleontologist when he grows up, the 9-year-old told CNN.
His outdoor explorations are even more exciting now.
"It's going to be hard to get him run around with shoes on or come inside to do his schoolwork," his mother told CNN.
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