A staff member at a Christian charity group wasn't expecting to find a giant 10,000-year-old mastodon tooth and a tusk when he opened the donation box, but that's exactly what happened.
The Mich. organization member going through their donations when he stumbled on something that didn't look like a toy, book, or clothing, ABC News reported.
Mastodons looked like oversized elephants, they roamed North America thousands of years ago,
"I picked it up and it looked like a tooth," John Timmer, an employee at the charity's warehouse, who found the tooth, told Good Morning America, ABC News reported. "The root was intact and it was cracked enough so you could see enamel. It definitely looked like some sort of tooth. But I didn't really know what to do with it."
Timmer decided to stash the tooth in a nearby cabinet for safe-keeping.
"About a week went by and I called the museum to see if they had somebody that could tell us what this thing is," Timmer said.
The Grand Rapids Public Museum already has a number of mastodon parts in their collection, so they were able to identify which ancient creature the tooth belonged to, the Grand Rapids Press reported.
"One of the bones, a tooth, is broken into two parts and is covered in some kind of lacquer. It's about the size of a loaf of bread," the Press reported. The tooth also came with a lacquered mastodon tusk.
Jay Starkey, director of In the Image, the charity that received the fossilized donation, said this is not the first time the charity has found a strange offering in their donations box. He said they often find drugs, once got an urn filled with (what was believed to be human) ashes, and had to send a $5,000 painting to the museum.
"I'd love to find out where this was from and the history behind it," Starkey said of the tooth.
