(CNN) An Ohio boy playing around in a creek bed stumbled across an odd, ridged object jutting out of the mud. To his surprise, it turned out to be a woolly mammoth tooth.

Jackson Hepner was visiting The Inn at Honey Run in Millersburg, Ohio, in July with his family when he made the discovery.

"His dad and his uncle are both really into natural history and understanding nature," Jason Nies, who owns the inn, told CNN affiliate WEWS on Tuesday. "They quickly jumped online and were Googling it, and that's when we quickly found out this might be a mammoth or a mastodon tooth."

Jackson's discovery.

Jackson's family and the inn wanted to find out for themselves what ancient fossil he had unearthed, so they contacted several professors in the area, including P. Nick Kardulias of the College of Wooster's Program of Archeology, the inn said in a post to its website

"He has been very excited since the find, and that excitement has grown with the increasing interest in the story," Jackson's dad Josh Hepner told CNN.

Read More