The remains of an extinct giant elephant have reportedly been discovered by a local resident walking along a beach in California, US.
According to CBS, the tooth, which is about 30 centimeters long, was discovered by a local resident who was walking on the beach in Rio del Mar on March 26토토사이트.
Not knowing what he had found, he snapped a photo and posted it to social media, where Wayne Thompson, who works as a paleontology collection advisor at the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History, immediately recognized it as a “mastodon” molar.
Mastodons are a group of Ice Age elephants, including mammoths, that are thought to have gone extinct 10,000 years ago.
“We were really excited to receive Mr. Smith’s call,” Liz Bruton, who manages visitor experiences at the museum, said in a statement. “He was nervous at first, but after seeing the photos on the news, we were all happy to see that the find was a fossil.”
“Only two specimens of the Pacific mastodon have been recorded from this region,” the museum said on Facebook, “and this discovery is significant in helping us better understand creatures from the last ice age.”