In Ohio it can be common to find a variety of fossils and arrowheads or similar artifacts buried just beneath our feet. No one in Nies' family thought they would find a tooth at the family reunion.
“My cousin has two kids and my sister has three kids,” Nies said. “So, I let the kids go down and play in the creek. They were just hanging out down there and my cousin’s son, Jackson, found this.”
The family started searching the internet right away to find what the fossil was.
“They thought it was a fossil of something, but they didn’t know what,” he said. “As soon as we saw the ridges on the bottom, it matched up with the pictures of what we would see for a [mastodon] tooth.”
For more on this story check out today's bonus segment with Len Berman and Michael Riedel...