Luck came not once, but twice for Jude Sparks.
The then-9-year-old was lucky enough to trip not on a rock, or a tree root, but on a 1.2-million-year-old fossil when trying to dash away from his brothers on a November desert hike with his family. And as New Mexico State University biology professor Peter Houde explains to the New York Times, Jude was lucky to have been at the Las Cruces, NM, site just after a storm had exposed the fossil—but before the exposure reduced the specimen to nothingness.