The fossilized tooth of a Pacific mastodon, an extinct Ice Age species related to woolly mammoths, was recently found in a California creek.
The creek bed containing the tooth is in the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District (Midpen) in San Mateo County, California. Workers were doing field surveys for another project when they found the tooth.
“It really stuck out. I had no idea what it was. I thought maybe it was a mollusk or something, but that didn’t make sense since it wasn’t near the ocean,” Brigid Lynch, who found the tooth while working in a forested area where the creek is located, told the Mercury News.
The tooth, a molar, belonged to an adult mastodon. The species went extinct roughly 11,700 years ago, coinciding with the end of the Ice Age.
“The tooth itself is in immaculate condition. It’s the most complete mastodon molar from our area, and the most spectacular mastodon molar that I’ve ever seen. I had chills and shivers up and down my spine,” paleontologist Wayne Thompson said in a Midpen statement.
The good condition of the molar could mean the tooth was only recently introduced into the creek.
“Because of how well-preserved it is, I don’t think it has been sitting in the creek the whole time. It probably washed out from somewhere more recently, like a hillside further upstream. When we get storms, there will be large slumps of land that can wash out at once. That’s often a time when fossils become exposed,” Christine Garcia, a specimen collection curator at Stanford University, told the Mercury News.
Midpen donated the tooth to nearby Stanford University in Palo Alto, which will carbon-date the molar to determine its age and help preserve it for future study.
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