TRAVEL | APTOS, CALIFORNIA- Beach stroll leads to prehistoric surprise

APTOS, CALIFORNIA (AP) – A woman taking a Memorial Day weekend stroll on a California beach, in the United States, found something unusual sticking out of the sand: a tooth from an ancient mastodon (AP, pic below).

But then the fossil vanished, and it took a media blitz and a kind-hearted jogger to find it again.

Jennifer Schuh found the foot-long tooth sticking out of the sand last Friday at the mouth of Aptos Creek on Rio Del Mar State Beach, located off Monterey Bay in Santa Cruz County on California’s central coast.

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“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,” Schuh recounted. “It looked kind of weird, like burnt almost.”

Schuh wasn’t sure what she had found. So she snapped some photos and posted them on Facebook, asking for help.

The answer came from palaeontology collections advisor for the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History Wayne Thompson.

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 wrote, and he urged Schuh to call him.

But when they went back to the beach, the tooth was gone.