A 9-year-old Michigan boy discovered a 10,000-year-old mastodon tooth, which throws more light on North America's prehistoric past.

Philip Stoll, a 9-year-old boy from Michigan wants to be a paleontologist when he grows a little older and it seems like the young lad has already started taking big steps toward a successful career. Last summer, while exploring a nearby creek, Philip came across a 10,000-year-old mastodon tooth. The tooth was about 8 inches long, had six peaks and was brown in color, according to CNN.

At first, he and his entire neighborhood weren't sure what it was but thought the discovery was "pretty cool" nevertheless.

"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, Philip Stoll's mother, told CNN. "It looked like a tooth. It looked like there was something like gum tissue, a little bulgy thing around the top."

A thorough Google search helped Philip and his mother contact a herpetologist named Jim Harding from Michigan State University. With the help of some photos of the discovery Philip sent him, Harding identified the fossil as the tooth of a prehistoric mastodon, an extinct elephant-like creature that roamed North America about 10,000 years ago, Times Herald reports.

He confirmed to the newspaper that mastodon fossils are recovered in Michigan about every three to four years.

"It is a great reminder of what used to roam the country," he said. "It most likely got stuck in a swampy area and drowned."

Mastodons are an extinct group of mammals related to elephants that inhabited North and Central America during the late Miocene or late Pliocene up to their extinction at the end of the Pleistocene 10,000 to 11,000 years ago.

They resembled woolly mammoths and had thick coats of shaggy hair and long, curving tusks. They lived in herds and dwelled in forests, living off a mixed diet of leaves, soft shoots and grasses. The rapid climate change in North America at the end of the Pleistocene period is believed to be the cause of their extinction.

The first remnant of the species was discovered in the village of Claverack, New York, in 1705 by French soldiers who carried it to the Mississippi River, from where it was transported to the National Museum of Natural History in Paris. A tooth some 2.2 kilograms (5 lb) in weight, it became known as the "incognitum".