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, N.M., 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 on 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.