This May 26, 2023, photo provided by the Jennifer Schuh shows a Mastodon Tooth in the sand at an Aptos, Calif., beach. A Northern California woman taking a Memorial Day weekend stroll on the beach has discovered a mastodon tooth that’s at least 5,000 years old. Schuh found the foot-long (.30-meter) tooth sticking out of the sand on Friday at the mouth of Aptos Creek on Rio Del Mar State Beach, located off Monterey Bay in Santa Cruz County. (Jennifer Schuh via AP)
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This May 26, 2023, photo provided by the Jennifer Schuh shows a Mastodon Tooth in the sand at an Aptos, Calif., beach. A Northern California woman taking a Memorial Day weekend stroll on the beach has discovered a mastodon tooth that’s at least 5,000 years old. Schuh found the foot-long (.30-meter) tooth sticking out of the sand on Friday at the mouth of Aptos Creek on Rio Del Mar State Beach, located off Monterey Bay in Santa Cruz County. (Jennifer Schuh via AP)
APTOS, Calif. (AP) — A woman taking a Memorial Day weekend stroll on a California beach found something unusual sticking out of the sand: a tooth from an ancient mastodon.
But then the fossil vanished, and it took a media blitz and a kind-hearted jogger to find it again.
Jennifer Schuh found the foot-long (.30-meter) tooth sticking out of the sand on Friday at the mouth of Aptos Creek on Rio Del Mar State Beach, located off Monterey Bay in Santa Cruz County on California’s central coast.
“I was on one side of the creek and this lady was talking to me on the other side and she said what’s that at your feet,” Schuh recounted. “It looked kind of weird, like burnt almost.”
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Schuh wasn’t sure what she had found. So she snapped some photos and posted them on Facebook, asking for help.
The answer came from Wayne Thompson, paleontology collections advisor for the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History.
Thompson determined that the object was a worn molar from an adult Pacific mastodon, an extinct elephant-like species.
“This is an extremely important find,” Thompson wrote, and he urged Schuh to call him.
But when they went back to the beach, the tooth was gone.
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A weekend search failed to find it. Thompson then sent out a social media request for help in finding the artifact. The plea made international headlines.
On Tuesday, Jim Smith of nearby Aptos called the museum.
“I was so excited to get that call,” said Liz Broughton, the museum’s visitor experience manager. “Jim told us that he had stumbled upon it during one of his regular jogs along the beach, but wasn’t sure of what he had found until he saw a picture of the tooth on the news.”
Smith donated the tooth to the museum, where it will be on display Friday through Sunday.
The age of the tooth isn’t clear. A museum blog says mastodons generally roamed California from about 5 million to 10,000 years ago.
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“We can safely say this specimen would be less than 1 million years old, which is relatively ‘new’ by fossil standards,” Broughton said in an email.
Broughton said it is common for winter storms to uncover fossils in the region and it may have washed down to the ocean from higher up.
Schuh said she is thrilled that her find could help unlock ancient secrets about the peaceful beach area. She didn’t keep the tooth, but she did hop on Amazon and order herself a replica mastodon tooth necklace.
“You don’t often get to touch something from history,” she said.
It’s only the third find of a locally recorded mastodon fossil. The museum also has another tooth along with a skull that was found by a teenager in 1980. It was found in the same Aptos Creek that empties into the ocean.
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“We are thrilled about this exciting discovery and the implications it holds for our understanding of ancient life in our region,” museum Executive Director Felicia B. Van Stolk said in a statement.
A new law requiring many California bars and nightclubs to offer common date-rape drug test kits will take effect Tuesday, according to the California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control.
The law, Assembly Bill 1013, requires approximately 2,400 establishments with a Type 48 license to have signage letting patrons know that drug testing kits are available.
Type 48 licenses are issued to bars and nightclubs and authorize the sale of beer, wine, and distilled spirits, according to the department.
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The signage reads, “Don’t get roofied! Drink spiking drug test kits available here. Ask a staff member for details.”
The drug testing devices will either be offered for sale at a reasonable price or be given to customers for free, according to the department.
Devices could include test strips, stickers, or straws that can detect the presence of controlled substances in drinks.
Eagles singer Don Henley filed a lawsuit in New York on Friday (June 28) seeking the return of his handwritten notes and song lyrics from the band’s 1976 album Hotel California.
The civil complaint filed in Manhattan federal court comes after prosecutors in March abruptly dropped criminal charges midway through a trial against three collectibles experts accused of scheming to sell the documents.
The Eagles co-founder has maintained the pages were stolen and had vowed to pursue a lawsuit when the criminal case was dropped against rare books dealer Glenn Horowitz, former Rock & Roll Hall of Fame curator Craig Inciardi and rock memorabilia seller Edward Kosinski.
“These 100 pages of personal lyric sheets belong to Mr. Henley and his family, and he has never authorized defendants or anyone else to peddle them for profit,” Daniel Petrocelli, Henley’s lawyer, said in an emailed statement Friday.
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According to the lawsuit, the handwritten pages remain in the custody of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office, which declined to comment Friday on the litigation.
Lawyers for Kosinski and Inciardi dismissed the legal action as baseless, noting the criminal case was dropped after it was determined that Henley misled prosecutors by withholding critical information.
“Don Henley is desperate to rewrite history,” Shawn Crowley, Kosinski’s lawyer, said in an emailed statement. “We look forward to litigating this case and bringing a lawsuit against Henley to hold him accountable for his repeated lies and misuse of the justice system.”
Inciardi’s lawyer, Stacey Richman, said in a separate statement that the lawsuit attempts to “bully” and “perpetuate a false narrative.”
A lawyer for Horowitz, who isn’t named as a defendant as he doesn’t claim ownership of the materials, didn’t respond to an email seeking comment.
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During the trial, the men’s lawyers argued that Henley gave the lyrics pages decades ago to a writer who worked on a never-published Eagles biography and later sold the handwritten sheets to Horowitz. He, in turn, sold them to Inciardi and Kosinski, who started putting some of the pages up for auction in 2012.
The criminal case was abruptly dropped after prosecutors agreed that defense lawyers had essentially been blindsided by 6,000 pages of communications involving Henley and his attorneys and associates.
Prosecutors and the defense said they received the material only after Henley and his lawyers made a last-minute decision to waive their attorney-client privilege shielding legal discussions.
Judge Curtis Farber, who presided over the nonjury trial that opened in late February, said witnesses and their lawyers used attorney-client privilege “to obfuscate and hide information that they believed would be damaging” and that prosecutors “were apparently manipulated.”
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