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A Michigan boy was recently hiking with his family when he entered a stream and tripped over something rocky that looked like a tooth. At first he thought it belonged to a dinosaur, but paleontologists later discovered that the massive molar was from a mastodon.
Julian Gagnon, 6, discovered the tooth on September 6 while walking through Dinosaur Hill Nature Preserve in Rochester Hills, Michigan, Detroit WDIV Local 4 reported October 1st.
“I just felt something on my foot and grabbed it,” Julian told WDIV. A Google search at home suggested that the tooth was probably not that of a dinosaur (or a dragon, as Gagnon also guessed, according to Michigan Live). On the contrary, the size and shape of the tooth resembled those of mastodon teeth, and an analysis performed by scientists at the University of Michigan Paleontology Museum (UMMP) later confirmed that this was the case, reported WDIV.
Related: Juggernaut bone: images of an early hunt
Mastodons are ancient relatives of modern elephants; they first appeared about 27 to 30 million years ago, and they died out about 10,000 years ago. They lived in forests all over the world, mainly in North and Central America, and were around 2.5 to 3 meters tall and weighed up to 6 tons (5.4 metric tons). according to the San Diego Museum of Natural History.
The molar crown found by Julian was about the size of an adult human’s fist, which excluded many smaller species, Adam Rountrey, head of the UMMP collection, told Michigan Live. At the top of the crown were “large bumps” that differentiate mastodon teeth from those of mammoths, another species of elephant relative from the extinct Ice Age who lived alongside behemoths, Rountrey added.
Julian decided the discovery was the first of his “career” as a paleontologist, his mother, Mary Gagnon, told Michigan Live. The hopeful young scientist also questioned whether he would receive a million dollars or become president because of his discovery, but he settled for a behind-the-scenes tour of the Ann Arbor Research Museums Center in the University of Michigan and a meeting with museum paleontologists, Michigan Live reported.
Originally posted on Live Science.
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