FAIRBANKS -- Ten-year-old J.P. Post was walking home from Woodriver Elementary School last week when he came face to face -- or rather face to tooth -- with a giant woolly mammoth that roamed his neighborhood more than 10,000 years ago.
The boy was traveling home on Aug. 22 along a well-worn path through a wooded area off Amherst Drive directly north of the school when he saw what looked like a jagged rock sticking out of the ground.
Using his hands, he dug his find out of the dirt. He hefted the object -- about the size of a toaster -- in his hands, examined the odd markings and deep striations and knew instantly that he was holding something special.
"I knew that it was not a rock because rocks don't look like that," he said. "I ran home yelling, 'Dad, I found a dinosaur tooth.' "
His father, Bill Post, was a little more skeptical at first. The unearthed object with its distinctive ridge of parallel bumps running along its flat bottom certainly looked interesting, he said, but he thought it was most likely a piece of petrified wood or just an odd mineral formation.
A few Google searches later, however, J.P.'s status as a fossil hunter was ingrained in history -- he had found a fossilized molar from an ancient woolly mammoth.
J.P., to say the least, was a bit excited.
"You don't really find this stuff every day," he said. "I was just walking home from school."
His dad was nearly as excited about the find as J.P. himself was.
"It's kind of cool to think that 100 yards from our door, there were woolly mammoths walking around," Bill Post said.
Woolly mammoths were a common feature of the Fairbanks landscape during the Pleistocene epoch more than 10,000 years ago, according to University of Alaska Fairbanks archaeologist Ben Potter.
"Not just mammoths, but a pretty wide range of critters were running around in the Pleistocene," he said.
Horses, lions, bison, even an extinct species of camel roamed the ancient tundra and grasslands in the area around what is now Fairbanks.
"There were no trees, no spruce forest as we have now," Potter said. "It was kind of a shrubby, tundra environment."
It's not uncommon, Potter said, for mammoth fossils to be found around Fairbanks.
"There's definitely been mammoth remains found ever since there has been placer mining activities," he said.
Teeth are typically one of the better preserved parts of the ancient animals, according to Potter.
"Enamel is an even more resilient material than bone, so it tends to preserve much better than bone specimens," he said.
J.P.'s find is in fairly good condition, although some of the outer layers of the specimen are cracked. He and his father took the tooth on Thursday to the University of Alaska Museum of the North, where Link Olson, the curator of mammals, urged them to donate the specimen to the museum, an option J.P. said he is strongly considering.
The young fossil finder also got a chance to see the museum's collection of mammoth fossils and learn more about the extinct animals.
In fact, this find has turned J.P. on to dinosaurs more than he's ever been before, said his mother, Ruth Post.
"He's a little obsessed about it now. He's trying to find the rest of the thing," she said, referring to the fact that J.P. has been out at the site of his find digging shallow holes to look for other specimens.
The boy has also been doing research on mammoths since his discovery and has learned many interesting facts, he said. He's even been able to piece together his own hypotheses about the ancient animals by comparing human teeth to the one he found.
"Our teeth aren't as flat," J.P. said, noting that even human molars are a bit jagged. "I think our teeth are a bit sharp because we eat meat, vegetables, fruit and apples and stuff. But mammoths could just eat vegetables and plants."
Bill Post said he was impressed with how lucky a find it was for his son, especially considering how well-traveled that particular path is.
"There's dozens of kids that walk home on this path every day," Bill Post said, noting however that J.P. has a knack for noticing details: "He's an artist so he has an eye for picking out things."
J.P., a fifth-grader at Woodriver Elementary, said he used to want to be an artist or a movie star but his recent initiation into the world of fossils has perhaps changed his mind.
"I kind of want to be a dinosaur person now so I can find more bones," he said.
