Jude Sparks was only 9 years old when he made a remarkable paleontological discovery.

While out for a walk with his family in Las Cruces, New Mexico, in November, Jude had been running to hide from his younger brothers when he tripped and fell. 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 Tuesday. “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. His parents, Michelle and Kyle Sparks, thought it resembled the remains of an elephant. So they took a picture of the object to investigate further.

“When we went home, we were trying to research,” Michelle Sparks said. “It didn’t match perfectly with elephants, so then we said, OK, I guess it was something else.”

They sent an email to a biology professor at nearby New Mexico State University, Peter Houde. He recognized the find almost immediately: These were the remains of a long-extinct Stegomastodon, and Jude had tripped over its fossilized tusk.

Houde said he gets calls and emails about potential finds from time to time — often, they amount to nothing much. But this time, it was different.

“This is really very unusual to find,” he said, explaining that prehistoric remains are so fragile that they typically disintegrate shortly after erosion exposes them to the elements.

The Sparkses simply got lucky by visiting the site shortly after strong rains had exposed the fossil.

When Houde and the Sparks family visited the remains one day after Jude’s discovery, they made sure to bury them again. After months of arranging a team, getting money and securing a permit, the skull was finally excavated in May.

The creature it belonged to lived at least 1.2 million years ago, Houde estimated.

Some have described Jude’s find as a dinosaur discovery, but it is not. The Stegomastodon was an elephantine creature — not a mastodon, but similar in appearance — whose existence was relatively recent. It walked the earth within the last few million years and may have even been hunted by humans.

By contrast, the dinosaurs that have best captured the public imagination — well-known species like the Tyrannosaurus rex, the triceratops and the velociraptor — lived during the Mesozoic Era, which ended about 66 million years ago.

Jude said that he went through a phase — between the ages of 5 and 8, to be exact — when dinosaurs and fossils excited him. Now his interest has been piqued again.

“I’m not really an expert, but I know a lot about it, I guess,” he said, explaining that he had learned about the yearslong process by which fossils are sometimes preserved or strengthened.

Houde hopes to put the Stegomastodon fossil on display at the university.

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“We’re pretty remote, and people here don’t get the chance to see stuff like this unless they take a big trip,” he said.

He added that it was “fantastic” that someone so young had stumbled across such a rare find.

“We’re really, really grateful that they contacted us, because if they had not done that, if they had tried to do it themselves, it could have just destroyed the specimen,” he said. “It really has to be done with great care and know-how.”