Jude Sparks was only 9 years old when he made a remarkable paleontological discovery.
While
out for a walk with his family in Las Cruces, N.M., in November, Jude
had been running to hide from his younger brothers when he tripped and
fell. He found himself face to face with something that, he said, looked
like “fossilized wood.”
“It
was just an odd shape,” Jude, now 10, said in a phone interview on
Tuesday. “I just knew it was not something that you usually find.”
It
looked like a massive jaw, and Jude’s younger brother Hunter thought it
belonged to a cow skull. His parents, Michelle and Kyle Sparks, thought
it resembled the remains of an elephant. So they took a picture of the
object to investigate further.
“When
we went home, we were trying to research,” Ms. Sparks said. “It didn’t
match perfectly with elephants, so then we said, O.K., I guess it was
something else.”
They sent an email to a biology professor at nearby New Mexico State University,
Peter Houde. He recognized the find almost immediately: These were the
remains of a long-extinct Stegomastodon, and Jude had tripped over its
fossilized tusk.
Continue reading the main story
ADVERTISEMENT
Continue reading the main story
Dr.
Houde said he gets calls and emails about potential finds from time to
time — often, they amount to nothing much. But this time, it was
different.
“This
is really very unusual to find,” he said, explaining that prehistoric
remains are so fragile that they typically disintegrate shortly after
erosion exposes them to the elements. The Sparkses simply got lucky by
visiting the site shortly after strong rains had exposed the fossil.
When
Dr. Houde and the Sparks family visited the remains one day after
Jude’s discovery, they made sure to bury them again. After months of
arranging a team, getting money and securing a permit, the skull was
finally excavated in May.
The creature it belonged to lived at least 1.2 million years ago, Dr. Houde estimated.
Some have described Jude’s find as a dinosaur discovery,
but it’s not. The Stegomastodon was an elephantine creature — not a
mastodon, but similar in appearance — whose existence was relatively
recent. It walked the earth within the last few million years and may
have even been hunted by humans.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment