California geomorphologist finds 10,000-year-old mastodon molar — SkimNews
Get the Health newsletter
Daily health & science — research, biotech, public health, the studies worth knowing. Free.
- Brigid Lynch, a geomorphologist working at a Midpeninsula regional open space district preserve in San Mateo County, California, stumbled across the fossil while initially mistaking it for a peculiar rock.
- Paleontologists confirmed the find as an adult Pacific mastodon molar roughly 10,000 years old, with paleontologist Wayne Thompson calling it "the most complete mastodon molar from our area" and the most spectacular he has ever seen.
- Pacific mastodons, elephant relatives dating back roughly 2.5 million years in North America and most prominent across the American West, went extinct more than 10,000 years ago due to combined climate-related habitat loss and human overhunting.
- Stanford University's School of Sustainability will use carbon dating on the donated molar to determine its exact age, with geoscience collection curator Christine Garcia framing fossils as the only window into past biodiversity and ecosystems.
- Other recent mastodon discoveries cited in the article include a 2024 find of a mastodon jaw under a New York state resident's lawn and a 2023 discovery of a foot-long mastodon tooth protruding from sand on a California central coast beach.
Why it matters: The molar gives Stanford researchers a rare, physically pristine specimen to refine the timeline of Pacific mastodon extinction in California and to model how climate change and human hunting pressure once collapsed Ice Age megafauna populations — work Garcia says directly informs modern biodiversity decisions.
Ask SkimNews
