Brigid Lynch went to work in a California creek looking for frogs and found a mastodon. Well, part of one anyway, which was probably for the best. Finding a tooth in a creek makes for an interesting afternoon. Finding the rest of a mastodon standing behind you would make for an entirely different story.
Brigid works in habitat restoration, and she was out doing some work involving the California red-legged frog, a threatened species that needs a little help these days. I don’t know exactly what a normal day of frog habitat restoration involves, but I’m fairly certain the employee handbook doesn’t include a section titled, “What To Do If You Find An Ice Age Elephant.” Yet there she was, walking along the creek when she noticed something that didn’t look quite right.
She picked it up.
It was a tooth.
A nine-inch tooth.
Now we’re already outside my area of expertise, but I feel reasonably confident saying that if you find a nine-inch tooth, whatever it came out of probably wasn’t friendly with the mailman. Once a tooth gets that big, I’m not even sure “tooth” does it justice. That’s building material. You could prop open a door with it. My entire lower jaw isn’t much bigger than that, and so far I’ve managed to get sixty-one years out of the original equipment.
Turns out Brigid had found the tooth of a Pacific mastodon, one of the enormous elephant relatives that wandered around western North America during the Ice Age. These weren’t exactly mammoths, although if one was chasing me I doubt I’d spend much time correcting the identification. Mastodons were big, hairy and equipped with teeth designed for grinding up branches, leaves and other vegetation. Apparently when the salad bar includes small trees, nature gives you better molars.
And this wasn’t just a little chip of prehistoric tooth that required three laboratories, a grant from the federal government and somebody squinting through a microscope to decide what it was. This thing is remarkably intact. The crown is there. The roots are there. You can even see the root canal. Somewhere a dentist is looking at a tooth that’s been lying around for thousands of years and thinking, “Would it have killed him to floss?”
The tooth is headed to Stanford, where people considerably smarter than I am will study it and figure out exactly how old it is. It’s at least 10,000 years old and could be considerably older, which means this thing had already been lying around for a very long time before anybody invented California, Stanford or dental insurance.
That’s when I started thinking about what that creek must have looked like when the original owner was still using the tooth.
California was a slightly different neighborhood back then. Mastodons wandered through the forests and wetlands along with mammoths, giant ground sloths and saber-toothed cats. A giant ground sloth, by the way, could grow to roughly the size of a modern elephant, which seems like information somebody should have shared when they named it a “sloth.” That’s a little like calling a grizzly bear a woodland hamster.
So imagine taking an evening walk around Brigid’s creek back then. There’s a mastodon over by the trees, a saber-toothed cat somewhere in the neighborhood and an elephant-sized sloth wandering around doing whatever elephant-sized sloths did. Suddenly today’s biggest outdoor concern—getting a mosquito bite—doesn’t seem quite as serious.
Then the mastodons disappeared. By around 10,000 years ago, they were gone from North America. Scientists still debate exactly what finished them off. The climate was changing as the Ice Age ended, their habitat was changing, humans were hunting large animals, and it may have been some combination of all of it. History rarely gives us one tidy answer, mostly because history apparently enjoys watching us argue.
Somewhere along the way, one particular mastodon lost a tooth. Maybe the animal died nearby. Maybe water moved the tooth into the creek later. Maybe it spent thousands of years slowly working its way through dirt and gravel until it finally landed where Brigid could find it. Nobody knows, and I actually like that part of the story better than pretending we do.
Just think about everything that happened while that tooth sat there. Thousands of winters came and went. People arrived. Generations were born and died. Towns appeared. Roads were built. California became a state. Somebody invented the freeway and then apparently immediately forgot how to merge onto it. Starbucks arrived. Millions of people went about their lives without having the slightest idea that a piece of the Ice Age was sitting there waiting for somebody to notice it.
Then Brigid Lynch went to work one day looking after frogs and happened to look down.
That’s my favorite part of this whole thing. She wasn’t hunting mastodons. There wasn’t a team of paleontologists crawling around on their knees with tiny brushes and those hats people wear when they want you to know they take archaeology seriously. She was doing an entirely different job and noticed something that didn’t belong.
There’s also a wonderful little bit of irony hiding in the creek. Brigid was there helping protect an animal that’s threatened with disappearing when she stumbled across a piece of an animal that disappeared thousands of years ago. You could probably turn that into some enormous philosophical statement about life, extinction and our place in the universe, but this is the Back Page and we’ve already spent enough time today discussing George Washington.
Sometimes a nine-inch mastodon tooth can just be a nine-inch mastodon tooth.
Still, I like the reminder. We spend an awful lot of our lives looking straight ahead, usually at whatever we’re supposed to be doing next. Every once in a while something interesting happens because somebody looks off to the side, turns over a rock or notices that the thing sticking out of the creek isn’t quite shaped like everything else.
So look around once in a while.
You probably won’t find a mastodon.
But then again, Brigid was looking for a frog.