22 Jul Boy Discovers 1.2 Million-Year-Old Stegomastodon Skull After Accidentally Tripping Over It

If you were like me as a kid, you didn’t sit still. Climbing, running, digging – you name it, I did it. I’m not exactly sure what treasures I thought I would find digging up my grandparents’ garden but I was pretty dedicated to getting my hands dirty. As you can imagine, a kid who spends all her time running around seeking adventure ends up tripping and falling quite a lot. All I have to show for it are small scars here and there. Jude Sparks, on the other hand, tripped and found a fossil. You read that right – a fossil that’s over one million years old.

You might have read the title of this article and thought “stego-who???” but that’s exactly what Jude found. A stegomastodon is an ancient, now extinct animal, which belongs to the proboscidean family. This is the same family which mastodons, mammoths and, of course, elephants belong to. Like elephants, the stegomastodon had two tusks and was considerably smaller than a mammoth. The stegomastodon is believed to have roamed North and South America 2.6 million to 11,700 years ago, and a full skeleton can be found in the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC.

Now, scientists are working on gathering further information about this extinct creature from an accidental discovery made by nine-year old Jude. Jude Sparks and his family were hiking through the New Mexico desert in November 2016 when Jude tripped and fell. Initially, the bone-like object appeared to be a jawbone and his family disagreed on what animal it belonged to. His brother believed it might be a cow’s skull, while his parents thought it was an elephant.

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