On the beach...a "piece" of an extinct animal stunned scientists
Mastodons in an American museum
A woman who was walking on a Californian beach for the weekend found something unusual in the sand: a tooth from an ancient mastodon.
Jennifer Schuh found a 30-centimetre-long "object" sticking out of the sand on Friday at Rio del Mar state beach off Monterey Bay in Santa Cruz County on the central coast of California .
Shuh wasn't sure what she found. So I took some pictures and posted them on Facebook, asking for help.
The answer came from Wayne Thompson, paleontology collections consultant for the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History.
The surprise came when Thompson confirmed that this body was a "worn molar" of the extinct mastodon.
Mastodon molars are large and prominent
?What is a mastodon
A mastodon is a large, extinct animal that looks like an elephant but has fur.
Mastodons lived in North America and Central America.
Mastodons appeared in the late Miocene and became extinct in the Pleistocene (Pleistocene), that is, from 10 thousand to 11 thousand years ago.
The age of the tooth is not clear. A museum blog says that mastodons generally roamed California around 5,000 to 10,000 years ago.
Historic molar
"We can safely say that this specimen will be less than a million years old, and is relatively 'new' by paleontological standards," said Liz Broughton of the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History.
It was common for winter storms to unearth fossils in the area, Broughton said, and they may have washed out into the ocean.
Shuh said she was thrilled that her discovery could help unlock ancient secrets about the quiet beach area.
"You can't often touch something from history," she said.
Source : websites