In late May, something interesting washed up on Rio Del Mar Beach in Aptos on the shore of Monterey Bay. It was not your standard bit of driftwood, a dead marine mammal, or a piece of flotsam from Japan.
In fact the jogger who found it did not know what she found, so she took a picture of it and did what most of us seem to do nowadays: she posted the picture on social media. Someone who did know what it was saw the post and that person was Wayne Thompson, the Paleontology Advisor for the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History. He identified the object as a tooth from an extinct mastodon!
When they returned to the beach the tooth was gone. So a search was begun to find where the molar tooth has gone through national and even international media. The efforts soon turned up the tooth. A local man saw the tooth on the beach and took it home. He saw that this was being sought after and he called the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History.
The tooth was put on display at the museum for three days on the first weekend in June. And that is where I saw the tooth and sketched it.

When I first stepped into the museum, it was much busier than usual. In front of the mastodon display stood the man himself, Wayne Thompson, being interviewed by a local news station. He told the reporter that the tooth was probably washed down Aptos Creek during the record rains of 2023 and then washed up onto the beach. This was a big story. I was told that NPR would be visiting the museum on Monday.
Mastodons are related to the wooly mammoth and the modern elephant. The Pacific mastodon (Mammut pacificus) once roamed the land that became California between five million to 10,000 years ago. So the tooth was an incredible and rare find. In fact the name mastodon comes from ancient Greek meaning “breast tooth”, referring to the nipple-like appearance on the crown of the molars.
Mastodons disappeared from North and Central America about 10,500 years ago. It believed that the mastodon was driven to extinction by early human hunters.
