Mammoth Mastodon unearthed in Michigan
University of Michigan-led dig unearths the most complete Mastodon since the 1940s
What’s between a rock and a hard place?
The answer is a 12,000-year-old rare mastodon tooth.
Last month at the Dinosaur Hill Nature Preserve, WDIV reported, 6-year-old Julian Gagnon was walking with his family when on the ground he spotted what they thought was a standard rock or a dinosaur tooth.
"I just felt something on my foot and I grabbed it up, and it kind of looked like a tooth," he said.
103-MILLION-YEAR-OLD DINOSAUR FOSSIL FOUND IN OREGON
It was a mastodon tooth, a quick search on Google revealed.
"At first I thought I was going to get money. I was gonna get a million dollars. So embarrassing right now," Julian said about the tooth of the extinct animals that date back 12,000 years.
The tooth is finding a new home with the University of Michigan Museum of Paleontologists.
"Honestly, I'm a little jealous, personally, because mining fossils is something that I wish I could do every day," said Abby Drake with University of Michigan Museum of Natural History.
"It's hard to be preserved as a fossil when an animal dies, most of the time it is scavenged," Drake added.
The rare find is incredible.
"The great thing about nature is you never know what you're going to find and that even if you are an expert, it doesn't mean that you're going to be the one to find things," said Amanda Felk, program director at Dinosaur Hill Nature Preserve.
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Julian’s future has been changed by his amazing discovery.
"I really wanted to be an archaeologist, but I think that was a sign that I'm going to be a paleontologist," he said.