Over the Memorial Day weekend, a woman was taking a stroll at Rio Del Mar State Beach in Northern California when she found a mysterious object in the sand that turned out to be a tooth from an ancient mastodon.
The foot-long tooth belonged to an adult member of the extinct Ice Age species. This object gives “local scientists their first evidence that a herd of mastodon likely roamed through this area during the Ice Ages,” according to a statement given to KRON 4 by Wayne Thompson, a paleontology collections advisor for the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History.
