A 9-Year-Old Tripped, Fell and Discovered a Million-Year-Old Fossil
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.
When Dr. Houde and the Sparks family visited the remains one day after Jude’s discovery, they made sure to bury them again.
“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.
“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.
Dr. Houde said he gets calls and emails about potential finds from time to time — often, they amount to nothing much.