Runner didn’t know he nabbed ‘invaluable’ find on CA beach — until turning on the news

As a runner trekked across a California beach, something caught his eye.

Jim Smith, who frequently runs in the Aptos area in Santa Cruz County, kept on going, though, Liz Broughton, the visitor experience manager at the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History told McClatchy News.

But on his return, it captivated him once again, Broughton said.

Smith thought it “looked cool and interesting,” Broughton said, so he picked it up and brought it home.

Days later, he was shocked when an image of the very thing he brought home from the beach popped on screen while watching the news, according to Broughton.

Smith, Broughton said, had brought home an ancient artifact — a mastodon tooth.

The museum’s search for the tooth

Unbeknownst to Smith, Wayne Thompson, a paleontologist with the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History, had been frantically searching for the tooth.

Just days before, Thompson told McClatchy News he came across a woman’s Facebook post, questioning what she may have found near Aptos Creek on Rio Del Mar Beach on Friday, May 26, after someone tagged him in the post.

“I took a look at it, and I knew it was a mastodon tooth,” Thompson said.

The out-of-town woman, however, did not pick up the tooth, and when Thompson went to search for it alongside her, it was gone, he said.

“With it being a holiday weekend on the beach, odds were never in our favor,” Broughton said. “But (Thompson) definitely put in the effort.”

Given its location, Thompson said he didn’t think the tooth would have been washed away with high tide. Rather, he suspected someone plucked it off the beach and took it home.

“I had very, very little hope that it would ever be found again, but I did have hope,” Thompson said.

So, he made posts on social media asking the person to come forward.

“We are currently ISO (in search of) anyone who might have recovered this tooth off the beach at the mouth of Aptos Creek at Rio del Mar,” Thompson wrote in an Instagram post. “It is an extremely important specimen: the worn molar of an adult extinct Pacific Mastodon, Mammut pacificus.”

The only other documented mastodon specimen from Santa Cruz County, a juvenile mastodon skull with two teeth, was “found in the exact same area” in the 1980s, Thompson said.