Who said the tooth fairy doesn’t deliver? Sometimes it just takes a couple hundred thousand years.
The Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History added a breathtaking ancient artifact to its collection this week after an almost 12-inch tooth belonging to a mastodon – asimilar in appearance to the woolly mammoth – was discovered washed up on a beach in Rio Del Mar.
A fossilized mastodon molar found near the mouth of Aptos Creek this week. The tooth is estimated to be less than 1 million years old. Captivated community members scoured the landscape during the busy Memorial Day weekend to no avail until longtime Aptos resident Jim Smith stumbled on the tooth while on his regular Tuesday morning jog and brought it to the museum shortly thereafter.
Though the long-extinct mastodon was a terrestrial creature, typically found in inland valley regions, Broughton said the fossil was likely unearthed during heavy winter storms earlier this year and carried down the myriad creeks and rivers within the massive regional watershed that drains out of the Santa Cruz coastline.
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