Evidence of huge creature larger than an elephant washes up on popular US beach
A MASSIVE tooth has washed up on a beach and is evidence that an animal related to an elephant from the Ice Age was once in the area.
The tooth was recently discovered along the Rio Del Mar State Beach near Santa Cruz, California, over Memorial Day weekend by a beach-goer who was stunned by the unusual find.
Jennifer Schuh said she spotted something strange in the sand and at first thought it looked like a piece of driftwood, she told Los Angeles Times on Thursday.
She posted a photo of it on Facebook to see if anyone knew what it was.
“People from Aptos find all kinds of stuff washed up on that beach, like horse teeth or fossilized sand dollars,” she said, per LA Times.
“And I was like, ‘Well, shoot, I’m going to post this crazy thing because I have no idea what it is.’”
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Wayne Thompson, a paleontologist at the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History was tagged by someone in the comments section to see if he would know.
Thompson immediately was shocked by the photo and wanted to get in contact with Schuh as soon as possible.
“This is an extremely important find,” Thompson wrote Schuh.
“Give me a call when you get a chance.”
The tooth was identified by Thompson as belonging to a Pacific mastodon, an elephant-like mammal that existed between 5,000 and 10,000 years ago during the Ice Age.
It is believed by some scientists that the Mastodon went extinct due to climate change.
Thompson explained that: “When this tooth was fossilized, sea levels were 300 feet lower than they are today. Elephants and mammoths could walk out to the Channel Islands.”
“It’s another piece of evidence that we have for climate change.”
The tooth was recently added to the Santa Cruz museum and is one of three known specimens to ever be discovered in the area, Thompson added.
Another beach-goer took the tooth home after Schuh spotted it which led to local news outlets asking for it to be returned once it was confirmed what it was.
The person who took it eventually turned it into the museum, per LA Times.
A great white shark was spotted attacking a dolphin to its death on a popular state beach also over the Memorial Day weekend.
While humpback whales proved to have an interesting self-care tactic in a new discovery from a study that tagged them.