Brigid Lynch was working along a wooded creek in a mountainous part of the San Francisco Bay Area on a habitat restoration project when something that didn’t look like the rocks she’d been studying caught her eye. It turned out to be the fossilized tooth of a Pacific mastodon. Lynch, a geomorphologist at Balance Hydrologics, made the discovery earlier this year. She spotted the fossil while working on a project to protect the threatened California red-legged frog in a preserve in San Mateo County. The public land management agency announced the find this week, and that it has been donated to Stanford University.

California has long been farm country, and its oceans soon could be, too. State coastal officials have voted to let a plan to build the United States’ largest kelp farm 6 miles off the Southern California coast move forward. The plan comes as the Trump administration seeks to ramp up aquaculture in the Pacific Ocean. Ocean Rainforest plans to grow giant kelp to develop agricultural products that can be used in the strawberry- and avocado-rich region. Some environmental advocates worry whales could get tangled in the lines used to grow the kelp.

With time running out to save the Great Lakes’ whitefish from a deadly mussel invasion, Michigan officials have a moonshot plan to pluck fish …

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (AP) — Patrick Sullivan was sure it was a “crazy neighbor” honking a car horn nonstop while Sullivan was up feeding hi…