Back in November, 9-year-old Jude Sparks was hiking with his family in New Mexico’s Las Cruces desert when he tripped over something and fell. Jude’s face landed next to what appeared to be a massive jawbone. Then he looked up and spotted a tusk.

As Jacey Fortin reports for the New York Times, Jude, now 10, had accidentally stumbled upon the fossilized skull of a 1.2 million-year-old stegomastodon, an extinct proboscidean that belongs to the same family as elephants, mammoths and mastodons. But at the time, Jude wasn’t quite sure what he had found.


“It was just an odd shape,” he tells Fortin. “I just knew it was not something that you usually find.”

Jude’s family put forth some guesses about the remains—his younger brother thought Jude had discovered a cow’s skull, while his parents speculated that the bones belonged to an elephant—but they soon decided to consult with Peter Houde, a biology professor at New Mexico State University.

According to an NMSU press release, the family had seen Houde interviewed in a YouTube video about a similar fossil found near the university’s campus. And when he saw the Sparks’ picture of the remains, Houde knew almost immediately that they belonged to a stegomastodon.