Dr. Houde said he gets calls and emails about potential finds from time to time — often, they amount to nothing much. When Dr. Houde and the Sparks family visited the remains one day after Jude’s discovery, they made sure to bury them again. The creature it belonged to lived at least 1.2 million years ago, Dr. Houde estimated. Dr. Houde hopes to put the Stegomastodon fossil on display at the university. “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.

Source: New York Times July 19, 2017 12:15 UTC