Some people want a hippopotamus for Christmas—but one man in Scotchtown, New York, got a mastodon.

The man, who did not want to be identified, found a fossilized mastodon jaw, complete with the extinct giant's distinctive teeth, in his backyard earlier this year. Scotchtown is about 70 miles (112 kilometers) northwest of New York City, and the jaw is the first found in the state in more than a decade.

A Dutch farmer unearthed the first mastodon found in North America in Claverack, New York, in 1705. About 150 fossils of extinct elephant relatives have been found across the state—about one-third of it in Orange County-and according to Not included in New Yorkmore than a dozen mastodon fossils have been found in New York City alone. Suffice it to say, southern New York was mastodon central back in the day.

Mastodons are not to be confused with mammoths, although both roamed the Earth through the Pleistocene and some of the Holocene. But there are some differences; Mastodon heads are flatter and their tusks are less curved. But the most obvious difference is the teeth: Mastodon teeth have conical points—fittingly, the name "mastodon" literally means "breast tooth."

According to Robert Feranec, the director of research and collections at the New York State Museum and curator of Ice Age mammals, the man found the mastodon while planting and at first mistook the teeth for baseballs.

"When I found the teeth and examined them with my hands, I knew it was something special and decided to call the experts," said the owner of the house in a museum. release. "I am delighted that our property has yielded an important find for the scientific community."

Subsequent excavations by museum staff and the State University of New York, Orange County, yielded a piece of toe bone, a fragment of a rib, and the entire jaw of an adult mastodon.

"While the jaw is the star of the show, the additional toe and rib fragments provide valuable context and the potential for further research," Cory Harris, an anthropologist at SUNY Orange, said in the same release. . "We also hope to explore the immediate area further to see if any more bones have been preserved."

In recent years, advances in ancient DNA research have helped scientists better understand the life and times of the North American mastodon. In 2022, a group of researchers managed to unpack most of those life history of the Buesching mastodon—lovingly called Fred—from his 13,000-year-old tusk.

The researchers carbon-dated the mastodon jaw to determine its exact age, but also its diet and the type of habitat it lived in—just as the aforementioned group did with Fred. According to the museum, the fossil will be exhibited in 2025.

The proboscideans of North America went extinct about 10,500 years ago, but their remains continue to reveal how ancient animals lived.