"Big dopamine hit."
What started out as a day to find smaller handheld fossils to share with students interested in prehistoric life, ended with a bigger discovery than two science teachers imagined.
Rick Cochrane and Henry Sadler, science teachers at Admiral Farragut Academy in St. Petersburg, were sourcing fossils along the greater Peace River area when they noticed what looked like the mandible of a mastodon.
And boy, were they correct. That wasn't it, though. In addition, they also found two tusks not far from where they found the mandible.
"We spend years looking for things like this, and many fossil hunters go their whole lives without so much as a glimpse of a mastodon tooth, let alone an entire jaw," Sadler said in a news release. "More importantly, I find the wow factor of such a large fossil to be so impactful to my students at Admiral Farragut Academy."
Read more at WTSP