The million-year-old tooth was found by a bather
Jennifer Schuh, a woman living in California, US, was walking along the beach for a long weekend in May and found something unusual in the sand: the tooth of a mastodon, a long-extinct animal. from 10,000 years ago.
The 12-inch tooth was stuck in the sand at Rio Del Mar Beach in Monterey Bay, central California.
- Share this news via WhatsApp
- Share this news via Telegram
Shaw said he was by a river that washed ashore. She was talking to a woman who noticed something strange near Xu’s feet. “It felt weird, you almost got burned,” she said.
Schuh wasn’t sure what he’d found, so he took some photos and posted them on Facebook asking for help.
Wayne Thompson, consultant paleontologist at the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History, saw the post and realized the object was a worn-out molar from a large Pacific mastodon, an extinct species that had some similarities to elephants.
“This is a discovery to the maximum Important,” Thompson wrote. He also told Shaw to call him, and then the two decided to head back to the beach. Only this second time, the tooth was gone.
Thompson posted a text on social media asking for help finding the artifact.
On Tuesday, a man who was running on the beach and found the tooth called the museum: the tooth was found again.
The age of the tooth is not clear. A museum blog claims that mastodons lived in California for more than 4 million years, but became extinct 10,000 years ago.
“We can safely say that this specimen is less than a million years old, and is relatively ‘new’ in terms of fossils,” said Liz Broughton of the Santa Cruz Museum.
