While walking along Rio del Mar State Beach near Santa Cruz over the Memorial Day holiday, a woman found a foot-long tooth from a Pacific mastodon that lived between 5,000 and 10,000 years ago. Los Angeles Times.
Mastodons, long extinct, were elephant-like mammals that flourished throughout the world from the Miocene to the Pleistocene. They differ from mammoths in the shape of their molar teeth.
The woman, Jennifer Shuh, was already unsure of what she had found and uploaded a photo of the object to Facebook to identify it and asked if anyone could help her identify it.
“People from Aptos find all kinds of things washed up on this beach, like horse teeth or fossilized sand dollars,” he said.
“And I was like, ‘Okay, shoot, I’m going to post this crazy thing because I don’t know what it is.’
Wayne Thompson, who someone mentioned in the comments section, said the object was a molar belonging to a Pacific mastodon, an elephant-like mammal that lived between 5,000 and 10,000 years ago during the Ice Age.
“This is an extremely important finding,” Thompson, a paleontologist at the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History, wrote to Schuh.
“Calling me when you get a chance.”
Thompson noted that the Santa Cruz Museum recently added the specimen to its collection — one of only three known specimens found in the area.
“When this tusk was fossilized, sea level was 300 feet lower than it is today. Elephants and mammoths could have gone as far as the Channel Islands,” Thompson said.
Storms are known to uncover ancient finds, but Thompson said this is the first time this has happened in his area.
But obtaining a mastodon tooth was not easy. After seeing the Facebook post, Thompson ran to the beach on Friday, but the teeth were gone.
“We were on pins and needles,” he said.
Thompson took to Instagram to ask if anyone knew the tooth, and if they did, to call the museum.
“It was like a social media news blitz, putting everything out there just to try to find out who took the tooth,” Thompson said.
“We’ve all studied history, but the moment you see something from the past that you can actually hold in your hands — it makes me laugh now just thinking about it,” Schuh said.
“The Santa Cruz Museum may install a temporary exhibit to show the scar,” Thompson said, adding that “longer term, staff hopes to put on an exhibit about the endangered elephants that live in the county.” Is.”