Those of us who are regular sons of beaches enjoy walking down the beach a way, seeing the sights.
We should all take a stroll with Jennifer Schuh. She was on a California beach and found something just a liiiiiiiiiiiiiiittle odd: a tooth from an ancient mastodon, sticking out of the sand.
I looked it up: Mastodons paraded around California 5 millions to 10,000 years ago, so they even predate Kevin Costner.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. I said Jennifer SAW the tooth protruding from the beach at the mouth of Aptos Creek on Rio Del Mar State Beach. That is near Monterey Bay in Santa Cruz County on California's central coast.
She knew it was more than just an old chicken bone tossed away, but she wasn't sure what it was. So she took photos of the tooth and posted them on Facebook, asking for help.
Help came from Wayne Thompson, palaeontology collections advisor for the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History.
Tooth expert Thompson identified the object as a worn molar from an adult Pacific mastodon, an extinct elephant-like species.
He and Ms Schuh hustled down to the beach, and what do you think? It was gone!
They spent a weekend looking for that tooth, after which Mr Thompson took to social media to ask for helping finding that missing molar.
Boom. Next thing you know, Jim Smith (if that was really his name) calls in and says he saw the tooth while jogging.
Uh huh.
Smith did donate the tooth to the local museum, and Ms Schuh went right to Amazon and purchased a replica mastodon tooth necklace, as people do.
Science now has determined that baby mastodons were not allowed to go swimming for a half hour after eating.
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