SANTA CRUS, Calif. (KRON)—Palaeontologists are busy looking for Ice Age teeth in Santa Cruz County this Memorial Day weekend.
On Friday, strangers picked up the teeth of a giant mastodon that first appeared on the beach of Aptos. Now scientists hope that this scientifically important tooth will be returned to the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History, where it will be studied and made available to the public as part of its ancient history.
The one-foot-long tooth was originally discovered by a beach-goer strolling along the sands near Aptos Creek on Rio Del Mar Beach. “She didn’t know what it was or how important it was. It’s like old firewood. So she left it there. It’s understandable,” said Wayne Thompson, paleontology collections adviser at the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History.
Curious, the woman took some close-up photos of the strange object in the sand, posted it on Facebook, and asked if anyone knew what it was.
“People were saying, ‘Wow, it looks like a giant tooth.’ It almost hit the floor. It was a mastodon tooth, and it was in the same area in Santa Cruz County where mastodons are known to live,” Thompson said. The tooth once belonged to an extinct Pacific mastodon.
Thompson contacted the woman on Saturday, who rushed back to the beach to find her. “It wasn’t there. Now it’s MIA,” Thompson told KRON4 on Monday.
Thompson said many people were visiting Rio del Mar’s beaches on holiday weekends, and it was likely that a second beach user had the tooth removed. Friday night’s high tide wasn’t high enough for ocean waves to carry objects away. Sunday’s search also found nothing buried in the sand.
The tooth was “so high up in the dry sand on the beach that the only option was that someone had taken it away.”
The first mastodons found in Santa Cruz County were discovered at Apt Creek, just upstream of the Tooth, more than 40 years ago. In 1980, Jim Stanton was just 16 when he found the skull of a juvenile mastodon in a stream. The skull turned out to be a Pacific mastodon specimen.
After paleontologists unearthed the skull, Thompson spent two years carefully assembling it in the museum. The skull is now on permanent display at the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History.
The recently discovered mastodon teeth belong to adults rather than juveniles, giving local scientists the first evidence that herds of mastodons likely roamed the region during the Ice Age.
“The skull found 40 years ago had sutures on the bones and was not fully fused, meaning it was a juvenile. The teeth found at the mouth of Aptos Creek were severely worn and probably belonged to an elderly person in their 30s or 40s,” Thompson said.
Paleontologists hope that anyone with the tooth will submit the ancient object to a museum. “This is super, super, super important to understanding elephant life in Santa Cruz County during the last Ice Age,” Thompson said. There are only a few mammoth specimens, and mammoths are more common than mastodons. Aptos was a popular destination for ice age melons,” he told KRON4. “This is part of the history of Santa Cruz.”
Based on carbon-14 testing, Harvard University scientists estimate that the Santa Cruz County mastodon was the last individual of the Mammut pacificus species before it went extinct about 5,000 years ago.
The Santa Cruz Natural History Museum is located at 1305 East Cliff Drive in Santa Cruz, above Seabright Beach. The museum can be reached by calling 831-420–6115 or by emailing collections@santacruzmuseum.org.
