This May 26, 2023, photo provided by the Jennifer Schuh shows a Mastodon Tooth in the sand at an Aptos, Calif., beach.

But acquiring the mastodon tooth was not easy. After he saw the Facebook post, Thompson raced to the beach on Friday, but the tooth was gone. “We were on pins and needles,” he said.

The tooth appeared to be from a male mastodon in its 30s or 40s, according to SFGA TE. They are about eight to ten feet tall and ate leaves and branches.

A mastodon tooth washed up on a California beach and then went missing. A local museum tried to track it down. It's pretty common to find seashells or coral on the beach. Outside Santa Cruz, Calif ...

This May 26, 2023, photo provided by the Jennifer Schuh shows a Mastodon Tooth in the sand at an Aptos, Calif., beach. (Jennifer Schuh via AP) ...

A collector of petrified rocks, Villanueva said he's never found anything before that compares to the seven-pointed tooth, which has been identified as a molar from a mastodon that died at least ...

A 6-year-old boy found a mastodon tooth while on a family walk in Michigan. DETROIT, Mich. -- A 6-year-old boy noticed something on the ground while on a family walk in Michigan last month.

The mastodon tooth has large cusps and basins for crushing tree leaves, twigs and other roughage between deep V-shaped grooves. The mammoth tooth is much flatter but has elaborate folds or ridges.

A 9-year-old Michigan boy stumbled across something – literally – that, it turns out, is a mastodon tooth. “I was walking down at the creek last summer.

“The mastodon is a distant cousin with the same teeth found in pigs, bears or humans. Over the course of their life, they have 40 teeth but just four, six or eight at a time.