When a California woman found what looked like used firewood on a beach, she snapped some photographs of the nevertheless strange-looking object and went on her way.
As it turns out, she had stumbled across something remarkable—a mastodon tooth, and after posting pictures of it on Facebook, set off a chain reaction that led to quite the saga.
“She didn’t know what it was, the importance of it. It looks like a piece of old firewood. So she left it there. It’s understandable,” said Wayne Thompson, a paleontology collections advisor for the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History.
KRON4 News reports that Santa Cruz is a hotspot for mastodon remains, and Thompson himself actually reassembled a whole mastodon skull for the museum once: it took 2 years.
Thompson contacted the woman, Jennifer Schuh, explaining the situation and asking her to go back and retrieve the foot-long bone, but, as she arrived there she realized that unlike her, someone else didn’t pass up the chance to pocket the super rare find.
A weekend of beachcombing didn’t turn it up, and so Thompson went to social media pleading to the new mystery owner to do the right thing and turn it over to the museum.
Then, a call came in from the nearby town of Aptos. Jim Smith had found it on a regular beach jog. According to Mr. Smith, he also didn’t know what it was but took it home rather than to social media.
Jim donated it to the museum.
“It’s super, super, super important for understanding elephant life in Santa Cruz County during the last Ice Age. There are only a few mammoth specimens, and mammoths are more common than mastodons. Aptos was a popular destination for Ice Age proboscideans,” Thompson told KRON4. “It’s a piece of Santa Cruz history.”
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Alive for between 5 million and 10,000 years ago, mastodons are the smaller, rarer cousins of mammoths, and while Santa Cruz is famous for their remains, this is only the third-locally recorded mastodon fossil.
Schuh didn’t get to take home such an important piece of natural history and set it above her mantle, but she went online and bought a scaled replica to wear as a necklace, saying it’s not often one gets to touch something with so much history.
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