A young elephant fanatic made a mammoth discovery when he visited a beach - a tooth belonging to an ancestor of the modern mammal that walked the earth 1.8 million years ago.
Charlie Orchard-Lisle, 11, a pupil at Snape Primary School, was walking along East Lane beach at Bawdsey on May 24 with his parents Eleanor and Jamie when they noticed a rock-like object on the edge of the shoreline being lapped by the waves.
The Sternfield family collected the object, about four inches in width, took a photo of it and posted the image on the Suffolk fossil finds page on the social media site Facebook.
Subsequently, the picture was shared with Professor Adrian Lister, a research leader in paleontology at the Natural History Museum in London, who confirmed the tooth was the upper left molar of an Anancus Avernensis.
Anuncus belonged to the genus tetralophodont gomphothere and was comparable to modern African bush elephants, reaching a shoulder height of more than 8ft, with a body mass of between five and six tonnes.
The species had largely straight tusks, which lacked enamel and is believed to have eaten twigs, bark, seeds and fruit.
Eleanor said: "Basically, we were walking along and ten minutes before my son Charlie was saying how much he loves elephants.
"We were walking along and could see this thing by the lapping waves so it must have been quite distinctive because it caught both our eyes, so we picked it up and my husband came over.
"We could tell it was something different. It had a different feel to it."
She believed the tooth may have been buried in the red crag cliff at Bawdsey and been flushed out by erosion.
"It is quite incredible and I can't believe you can find something so old that existed 1.8 million years ago and then just rocks up on the beach," she added.
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