6-yr-old from Michigan discovers 11,000 year old mastodon fossil

A six-year-old boy from the US state of Michigan stumbled upon a fossil of a mastodon, that roamed the Earth 11,000 years ago. The boy named Julian Gagnon found the animal’s tooth while he was trekking at Michigan’s Dinosaur Hill Nature Preserve in Rochester Hills with his family and initially thought it to be a dragon's tooth, multiple media sources reported. The recovered fossil is almost the size of a human hand and experts from the University of Michigan asserted that the tooth broke off a mastodon. 

Mastodons inhabited the North and Central America 

The mammals are estimated to have roamed North and Central America around the late ice age, which ended 11,000 years ago. These creatures were massive and had an appearance resembling the woolly mammoths. Weighing over eight tons and reaching 10 feet in length, they must have been one of the largest creatures on earth during their survival period, as per Daily Mail. 

Experts figure that the mastodons mostly inhabited forests and wetlands, where leafy food was abundant and disappeared before humans emerged to hunt them down. According to recent carbon dating methods, the elephant ancestors must have died out due to change in habitats, that was from forests to high altitude regions having less vegetation.

Gagnon’s discovery

Researchers from the University of Michigan have confirmed that the fossil found in the 16-acre campus of the preserve is of a mastodon. Abigail Drake, from the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History, said that the preservation of an animal as a fossil after its death is rare as it normally gets scavenged. 

This new discovery adds to the list of other findings of mastodon fossils as gold miners in Colombia discovered a 3.5-foot long tusk of a mastodon along with its remains in September last year. Apart from this, another fossilized mastodon tooth was recovered by a teenager near Missouri’s Grand River, just two months later, reports Daily Mail.

This week has been fairly significant for fossil discoveries as paleontologists recently discovered two new species of carnivorous dinosaurs with crocodile-type skulls from the Isle of Wight in the UK’s Southern part. The experts revealed that these species of dinosaurs might have been able to hunt both on land and underwater.

Image: Twitter/@USRealityCheck