California woman finds ancient mastodon tooth walking on beach huffpost. According to experts, the fossil is about one million years old.
Jennifer Schuh found a tooth sticking out of the sand while walking on the Rio del Mar State Beach. She was with a friend and she noticed how a friend had almost stepped on a strange object with her foot.
“I asked him what was under his feet. It looked very strange, as if it had been burned,” Jennifer recalls.
The woman took several photos of the find and posted them on social networks, asking for help from subscribers. The answer came from Wayne Thompson, consultant for paleontological collections at the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History.
Thompson determined that Jennifer had found the molars of an adult Pacific mastodon, an extinct species of elephant.
Later, a tooth was taken from the beach by Jim Smith, who brought a valuable find to the museum.
“We can say with certainty that this specimen is at least a million years old,” the museum said.
Luck also smiled at a nine-year-old schoolgirl from the United States who found a shark tooth on the beach. 2.5 million years old.