Some fossil finds have been made through systematic digging and study for years, while others have been made by sheer chance. On one occasion in 2016, 9-year-old Jude Sparks found himself hiking with his family around Las Cruces, New Mexico, where he stumbled upon a fossil embedded in the desert floor. Upon closer inspection, the object had features that did not seem typical of any rock he knew.
His parents saw part of a jawbone and a tusk poking out of the ground. According to a Smithsonian Magazine article, the mysterious object turned out to be a skull fragment from a 1.2-million-year-old stegomastodon, now preserved in the desert's sands. The significance of this find was that stegomastodons are colossal prehistoric relatives of elephants and mammoths.
