Nine-year-old boy trips, falls and discovers one-million-year-old fossil

'This is really very unusual to find,' Professor Peter Houde says

(REUTERS/Stoyan Nenov)

A young boy from New Mexico recently made an accidental discovery that’s sure to make his classmates – and scientists around the world – extremely jealous.

Nine-year-old Jude Sparks was walking with his family in Las Cruces, New Mexico when he tripped and fell over something protruding from the dirt.

On further examination, he and his brother determined it to be the remains of a “big fat rotten cow”. The two brought it to their parents, who identified it as an elephant skull.

They were all wrong.

According to Peter Houde, a biology professor at New Mexico State University who the family consulted, the skull belonged to a 1.2 million-year-old Stegomastodon – a distant relative of the elephant, similar to a mastodon.

“This is really very unusual to find,” Mr Houde told The New York Times, adding that it was “fantastic” that such a young person had made the discovery.

Stegomastodon fossils are a rare find in the US, for reasons scientists have yet to pin down. Only a couple hundred have been found in the world, according to Spencer Lucas, curator of palaeontology at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science.

After talking to the Sparks family in November, Mr Houlde quickly got to work gathering a team, securing a permit, and finding funding for the dig. He conducted the final excavation in May – six months after the initial discovery.

“We’re really, really grateful that [the Sparks family] contacted us, because if they had not done that, if they had tried to do it themselves, it could have just destroyed the specimen,” Mr Houde said. “It really has to be done with great care and know-how.”

Mr Houde now hopes to put the fossil on display at the university.

As for Jude, the whole experience has reignited his interest in – and greatly expanded his knowledge on – the field of palaeontology.

“I’m not really an expert, but I know a lot about it, I guess,” he told the Times.