BOVINA, Miss. — A group of kids spent their spring break doing some unintentional hands-on learning of prehistoric life.
Shawn and Caid Sellers and their cousin Michael Mahalitc made an amazing discovery on their family's property in Bovina, Mississippi. They dug up a mastodon jawbone, the Vicksburg Post reported.
At first they thought it was only a log, then they noticed teeth on it when they turned it over.
"It was heavy. I tried to lift it. We all tried to lift it," Caid told the paper.
When they told Shawn’s and Caid’s parents they found a dinosaur bone, the boys’ mother called in the experts.
"I called the (Mississippi) Museum of Natural Science and told them what the boys found. My husband took it over to the museum the next day and they confirmed it was a mastodon bone," Lynett Welch told the Post.
This isn’t the first old relic they found on the property. They’ve found petrified wood at their home, but this is certainly a surprise.
A curator at the museum said the jaw belonged to a mature mastodon, based on the number of teeth, the Post reported.
The jaw isn’t the first mastodon artifact discovered in the area recently, but it’s not the norm.
It was the third mastodon-related item museum curator George Phillips had looked at over the past month, but the left jaw bone, "Is very extraordinary."
Caid isn’t donating his find either. He’s keeping and preserving it. His mother said she expects the budding paleontologist will find more.
Mastodons were alive between 11,700 and 2.6 million years ago and were found all over the world, according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
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