Woman on California beach finds ancient mastodon tooth | Trending

A woman taking a Memorial Day weekend stroll on a California beach found something unusual sticking out of the sand: a tooth from an ancient mastodon. But then the fossil vanished, and it took a media blitz and a kind-hearted jogger to find it again.

Woman on California beach finds ancient mastodon tooth.(Instagram/@Wayne Thompson)

The tooth, which was around a foot long (.30 metres) and protruding out of the sand, was discovered Jennifer Schuh at the entrance of Aptos Creek on Rio Del Mar State Beach in Santa Cruz County, off the coast of Monterey Bay.
“I was on one side of the creek and this lady was talking to me on the other side and she said what’s that at your feet. It looked kind of weird, like burnt almost,” Schuh told AP.
What Schuh had discovered was unclear to her. She then took and shared them on Facebook to inquire about it. Wayne Thompson, the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural Hory’s collection advisor for palaeontology noticed her post and answered her question.
Thompson determined that the object was a worn molar from an adult Pacific mastodon, an extinct elephant-like species. “This is an extremely important find,” Thompson told AP, and he urged Schuh to call him. But when they went back to the beach, the tooth was gone.
A weekend search failed to find it. Thompson then sent out a social media request for help in finding the artifact. The plea made international headlines.
Take a look at the post below:

On Tuesday, Jim Smith of near Aptos called the museum.“I was so excited to get that call,” said Liz Broughto, the museum’s visitor experience manager to AP. “Jim told us that he had stumbled upon it during one of his regular jogs along the beach, but wasn’t sure of what he had found until he saw a picture of the tooth on the news.”The tooth was donated Smith to the museum. It’s unclear how old the tooth is. According to a museum blog, mastodons typically inhabited California between 5 million and 10,000 years ago.“We can safely say this specimen would be less than 1 million years old, which is relatively ‘new’ fossil standards,” Broughton told AP in an email.Broughton said it is common for winter storms to uncover fossils in the region and it may have washed down to the ocean from higher up.Schuh said she is thrilled that her find could help unlock ancient secrets about the peaceful beach area. She didn’t keep the tooth, but she did hop on Amazon and order herself a replica mastodon tooth necklace.”You don’t often get to touch something from hory,” she said to AP.It’s only the third find of a locally recorded mastodon fossil. The museum also has another tooth along with a skull that was found a teenager in 1980. It was found in the same Aptos Creek that empties into the ocean.“We are thrilled about this exciting discovery and the implications it holds for our understanding of ancient life in our region,” museum Executive Director Felicia B. Van Stolk said in a statement to AP.