A 9-Year-Old Tripped, Fell and Discovered a Million-Year-Old Fossil<br />He found himself face to face with something that, he said, looked like “fossilized wood.”<br />“It was just an odd shape,” Jude, now 10, said in a phone interview on Tuesday.<br />When Dr. Houde and the Sparks family visited the remains one day after Jude’s discovery, they made sure to bury them again.<br />“It didn’t match perfectly with elephants, so then we said, O. K., I guess it was something else.”<br />They sent an email to a biology professor at nearby New Mexico State University, Peter Houde.<br />“I just knew it was not something that you usually find.”<br />It looked like a massive jaw, and Jude’s younger brother Hunter thought it belonged to a cow skull.<br />Dr. Houde said he gets calls and emails about potential finds from time to time — often, they amount to nothing much.
