A nine-year old boy from Michigan stumbled upon a 10,000-year-old mastodon tooth while walking by a creek in his Lansing neighborhood.

9-year-old Phillip Stoll, known by community members as "Huckleberry Phil" due to his fondness of exploring, explained how he found the tooth to CNN. 

"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," he recalled.

Stoll then took the tooth home, washed it, and cleaned it in his family's kitchen sink. The boy wanted to know if the tooth was magnetic, but his mother, Heidi Stoll, told him that it was not.

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

The tooth that Phil found measured eight inches long, had six peaks/angles and was brownish in color. Both mother and son were curious to find out what Phil found, so they researched for information on the Internet. Their research led them to a herpetologist at Michigan State University, James Harding, who confirmed that the tooth once belonged to a mastodon.

Harding's findings indicated that the upper part of the tooth had been broken from the roots of the mastodon's mouth.

The mastodons are an extinct group of mammal species related to the modern elephants which inhabited the North and Central America some 11,000 years ago. Scientists believe that rapid climate change and hunting led them to the disappearance of their population.

In 2008, California resident Nancy Fidler auctioned off a mastodon skeleton for a minimum bid of $115,000. The skeleton was found in the family ranch in 1997.

The Stolls have not yet expressed whether they intend to sell their found artifact.