PESCADERO – A young mountain lion was captured Wednesday morning inside a classroom at Pescadero High School, authorities said.

Deputies were called to the school at 350 Butano Cutoff at 8:23 a.m. for a report of a puma on campus, said Detective Javier Acosta of the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office. A custodian had contained the animal inside an English classroom by closing the door.

School had not yet started and students were kept in other classrooms, Acosta said.

Acosta said deputies confirmed the animal was a mountain lion and contacted the California Department of Fish and Game.

The puma was captured by mid-afternoon and taken to the Oakland Zoo for a health assessment, said Ken Paglia, a spokesperson for the California Department of Fish and Game.

Paglia said the mountain lion was four to six months old and underweight at roughly 40 pounds.

“Even though we can’t be sure exactly what happened, a fair guess would be that this is a young dispersing male mountain lion that was kicked out by its mom and was in search of new territory,” Paglia said when asked how the puma ended up at the school.

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“These pumas, their habitats are splintered by human development, so often they have to find their way from one patch of habitat to another patch of habitat, and then they end up having to go through some sort of urban or urban edge type of location,” he said.