A group of California elementary school students stumbled upon a significant discovery while playing in a creek in the Santa Cruz Mountains. They were looking for crawdads, but instead they uncovered a prehistoric left arm bone belonging to a Jefferson’s ground sloth, estimated to be between 11,500 and 300-thousand years old.
The bone was taken to the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History, where it was examined by experts and identified as the first reported fossil evidence for the species in Santa Cruz County. The museum’s executive director, Felicia Van Stolk, says the discovery will help to “inspire generations of museum visitors and scientists.”
Jefferson’s ground sloths were large herbivorous mammals, and the newly discovered fossil will be displayed at the museum's Art of Nature exhibit from March 23rd to May 26th. According to museum officials and paleontologists involved in the analysis, the significance of the find lies in its rarity and the opportunity it presents to engage people with the distant past.
Source: PEOPLE