Mastodons -- elephant-like beasts that lumbered across North America more than 10,000 years ago -- are long extinct , but apparently it was n't tooth decay that did them in . A 9-year-old Michigan boy stumbled across something -- literally -- that , it turns out , is a mastodon tooth . `` I was walking down at the creek last summer . I felt something that I stepped on so I picked it up and everybody in the neighborhood thought it was pretty cool , '' Philip Stoll told CNN on Friday . Affectionately called `` Huckleberry Phil '' in his neighborhood near Lansing because of his penchant for exploring outside , Philip took the lump home and washed it off in the kitchen sink , and checked to see if it was magnetic , his mother , Heidi Stoll said . It was n't . The peculiar object was about 8 inches in length , brown , and had six peaks . `` I was holding it in my hands for a few minutes and then it gave me the creeps so I put it down on the desk , '' Heidi Stoll told CNN . `` It looked like a tooth . It looked like there was something like gum tissue , a little bulgy thing around the top . '' After researching `` large tooth object '' on the Internet , mother and son reached out to James Harding , a herpetologist -- an expert on reptiles and amphibians -- at nearby Michigan State , who told them it was the tooth of one of the long-gone beasts that roamed the area millennia ago . `` This is indeed a mastodon tooth , '' Professor Harding confirmed in an e-mail . `` Apparently ( it is ) the upper surface , broken off at the roots . '' Philip told CNN that he always thought he might want to be a paleontologist -- a scientist who studies prehistoric life -- but now feels that more than ever . And with summer approaching , there 's more exploring to be done . `` It 's going to be hard to get him run around with shoes on or come inside to do his schoolwork , '' Stoll said of her son .
A Lansing boy exploring a creek finds what looks like a really big , really old tooth . The tooth is about 8 inches in length , brown , and has one peaks . An expert determines it 's a tooth from a long-extinct mastodon . Mastodons were elephant-like beasts that roamed North America Friday .