A schoolboy who tripped over what his brother dismissed as a “big fat rotten cow,” turned out to have discovered the 1.2 million-year-old fossilised remains of a stegomastodon during a family hike in New Mexico.
The accidental find by Jude Sparks, nine, eventually led to paleontologists excavating the site and unearthing the one-ton skull of the ancient mammal, an ancestor of the elephant.
“I was running … and I tripped on part of the tusk. My face landed next to the bottom jaw. I looked farther up, and there was another tusk,” said Jude who was out with his family testing his new walkie-talkie set.
Jude said that when he told his friends “most of them didn’t even believe me”.
The family contacted an expert at New Mexico State University, who spent several months getting permission to dig at the site in the Las Cruces desert. The details of the site were kept secret until the excavation was completed.
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Now, seven months after Jude’s find, the skull is preserved in the university’s vertebrate museum. On the dig, the paleontologists built a frame of plaster and wood around the remains to shore up the brittle bones before lifting them from the ground.
“It was incredibly exciting because fossils in this condition are extremely rare,” said Dr Peter Houde, a biology professor at NMSU.
Stegomastodons were proboscideans, trunked mammals, that lived in North America between 5.3 million and 11,700 years ago. They were distant relatives of the woolly mammoth, stood around 8.5ft (2.6m) tall, weighed over four tons and grew tusks up to 11.5ft (3.5m) long.
Their remains rarely survive the erosion of the land in which they are buried. Jude’s find was only the second complete skull found in New Mexico and is thought to have possibly been exposed by heavy rainfall.
Jude’s father, Kyle, said: “Like most kids, he had this really strong phase — maybe at five or six years old — where he’d be reading every dinosaur and fossil book you can imagine. He’s ecstatic about it.”