29 year old Alex Lundberg took a trip to Venice Beach FL to go diving and looking for fossils. He's been doing this for about 5 years now. He's found a few small items which was always thrilling but nothing prepared him for this.
About 10 minutes into his dive, he noticed something that looked like a piece of wood embedded in the sand. Diving in about 25 feet of water.
Lundberg dusted off the object and said he recognized it as a prehistoric tusk.
Once he brought it on shore experts identified it as a 4-foot-long, 70-pound mastodon tusk. They believe it could be 10 million years old! The distant relative of the woolly mammoth lived from about 23 million years ago to as recently as 10,000 years ago.
Alex says 'The great thing about Florida, especially if you're looking for animals that were around during the last ice age, is that the coastline extended way further out than today. So these animals were walking on dry land up to 50 or 60 miles out to the Gulf of Mexico relative to us today".
The discovery left Lundberg in awe. He describes the experience of uncovering a piece of history dating back millions of years as "absolutely surreal" and thrilling.
Lundberg is aware that Florida law mandates reporting such finds to the state, which technically owns all vertebrate fossils found on public land or water. But he’s hoping that the Florida Museum will pass on the tusk since they already have more complete specimens. If he’s able to keep it, he wants to one day pass it down to his grandchildren.