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Experts have confirmed that a human jawbone that was mysteriously discovered in a child’s rock collection once belonged to a United States Marine, who died during his military service over 70 years ago. The identification was made thanks to the work by a group of college students and a high school intern who may be the youngest person to help solve a genetic genealogy case.

U.S. Marine Corps Captain Everett Leland Yager was killed in a military training exercise in July 1951, according to a news release issued this week by Ramapo College, the New Jersey institution where students performed tests on the jawbone and eventually linked it back to him. A separate statement from the college’s Investigative Genetic Genealogy Center noted that the military exercise involved an airplane accident, although it did not provide more details than that.

The accident that left Yager dead happened over California, and experts said his remains were recovered afterward in the state’s Riverside County and buried in Palmyra, Missouri. It was assumed at the time that all of the remains were recovered and buried. But, decades later, in 2002, a human jawbone containing several teeth was submitted to local law enforcement in northern Arizona, where a boy’s parents believed their child had picked up the bone before mistakenly adding it to his rock collection.

Emily Mae Czachor