The eastern side of the Los Angeles Basin is a place that has deep ties for me because my parents lived there in the 1950s. My dad attended Loma Linda Medical School, and my mom edited the medical school’s alumni journal. They met and spawned a paleontologist. This is somewhat ironic because Loma Linda is a Seventh Day Adventist (SDA) school, and SDAs are the original American creationists. It was SDA George Mc-Cready Price who, in 1915, watched the advances of paleontology and geology and saw the writing on the wall for his biblical view of the world. He realized that the data emerging from the fossil fields was beginning to strongly support a Darwinian worldview, and he figured there must be another way to interpret those new findings. His writings were built on the insights of the emerging fossil record, and he conceived the idea that the flood of Noah was responsible for the stratigraphic record that we see today.
An assortment of Ice Age mammals roaming a modern-day landfill near the town of Chowchilla, California.
The title of one of Price’s early books, God’s Two Books, referred to the Bible and the geologic record as dual references to the same set of events. In a time before plate tectonics, radiometric dating, and DNA, it was an argument that made sense to the congregation, and the SDAs became the leading proponents of creationism and a 6,000-year-old Earth. One curious by-product of this history is that the SDAs were unusually interested in stratigraphy and fossils. They had an axe to grind, and the stratigraphic record was one of their tools. As the century rolled on and science blossomed, however, their argument crumbled into powder. This fact was not noticed by the church, whose beliefs could not loosen to accommodate the new knowledge. So it was that I grew up attending a church that was dogmatically creationist but very interested in fossils and geologic time. In some way, my becoming a paleontologist was not a rebellion at all but simply a result of paying attention to the discussions at church.
As a result, I clearly have mixed feelings when I drive through Loma Linda. On campus, geologic time is still a touchy topic, and the geology department has to tread very carefully lest it offend the university’s administration and the on-campus Geoscience Research Institute. A recent (2000) stratigraphy textbook by Leonard Brand, one of Loma Linda’s geology professors, presents a markedly upside-down view of the rock record. His approach might have flown in 1860, but it is largely outside the realm of science today. I still have relatives and friends who live in Loma Linda and subscribe to the church’s teachings. I’m actually grateful to the church for introducing the idea of evolution to me when I was a kid. By pushing the opposite view so hard, they accidentally gave me an earlier and more effective introduction to science than I might otherwise have had.
But just because they drove me to paleontology doesn’t mean that their message has always backfired. In fact, the percentage of Americans subscribing to a message of a young Earth and a week of creation has remained stubbornly high, even as the scientific evidence for Earth’s antiquity continues to pour out of the ground. And ironically, a lot of that evidence is found not far from Loma Linda.
The eastern part of the Los Angeles Basin is full of fossils and paleontologists, and I had long admired the work done at the San Bernardino County Museum in Redlands. Like many paleontologists in southern California, Eric Scott and Kathleen Springer spent their careers salvaging amazing fossils from construction sites. In 2014, their work led to the naming of the Tule Springs National Monument to the west of Las Vegas. If you were to run into Kathleen or Eric on the street, you might think Eric was on his way to a business meeting and Kathleen was on her way to catch some waves; neither looks like your typical paleontologist.
The museum was closed when we showed up, and we wandered through the half-finished exhibit about local geology and paleontology. It was a fun exhibit, complete with a California geology kitchen where visitors could cook up their own stories about the local rocks and fossils. Down in the collection rooms, we got a chance to see some local treasures. And just twenty minutes from the museum, the road over Cajon Pass displays more than 70 million years of fossil-rich local history. From dolphins to horses and camels, the world-class fossils from the valley walls paint a dynamic picture of San Bernardino County.
Our real goal for visiting Kathleen and Eric was to scope out the Western Science Center, which opened in Hemet in 2006. The museum’s website called itself the “Smithsonian of the West,” and it had become a Smithsonian Affiliate museum in 2008. Since I was a newly minted Smithsonian museum director, it seemed worth a look. We hopped in Kathleen’s Jeep and headed south.
The fossil saga of Hemet started back in 1993 when the Metropolitan Water District of Los Angeles decided it might be prudent to build a reservoir east of the San Andreas Fault. With 20 million people living to the west of the fault, it seemed like a good idea in case of a major earthquake. There were not a lot of good sites, so they settled on Hemet and began to build a curious reservoir between two east–west trending mountain ranges, damming both the east and the west drainages between the mountains with a pair of huge earthen dams. Once filled with Colorado River water (what else?), the double-dammed reservoir was initially called the Domenigoni Valley Reservoir, but it is now called Diamond Valley Lake. The giant bathtub was to become the largest reservoir in southern California, and it would have a capacity of 300,000 acre-feet of water. To pull this off, they would have to move 210 million cubic yards of dirt! Knowing that both archaeological artifacts and fossils might be found on the site, the budget included an amazing $6 million for salvage paleontology, $30 million for salvage archaeology, and $30 million to support the idea that a paleontology/archaeology/water museum would be built alongside the new reservoir. Work began in 1993.
Eric Scott harassing Kathleen Springer with the skull of a Miocene camel from Cajon Pass.
Kathleen Springer pondering an earlier version of herself cleaning the teeth of a mastodon skull from the Diamond Valley Reservoir near Hemet.
Kathleen Springer was hired as a project paleontologist and got right to work. The fossils came fast and furious, and they had to race the bulldozers as the project moved forward. The digging roared forward at twenty hours a day, six days a week. The first fossil found was part of a mastodon, and thousands more soon followed. The digging went on for a decade and when the dust had settled, the fossil salvage crew had located 2,646 fossil localities and collected more than 100,000 bones. The picture that emerged was of a world 40,000 years ago that was populated by mastodons, mammoths, horses, camels, bison, and three different kinds of ground sloths. In some ways, these animals were similar to those found at La Brea, but there were significant differences as well – one being that carnivores, while present, were quite rare. From this view, it is pretty easy to see how the sticky tar at La Brea resulted in the overrepresentation of carnivores.
By 2000, parts of 140 mastodons had been collected, and the paleontologists lobbied to rename the lake Mastodon Valley Reservoir. Despite the fact that no diamonds were found, they ultimately lost the naming battle, and Diamond Valley Lake was christened in 2002. The museum opened in 2006.
We pulled into the parking lot of the Western Center, and I saw a place with a lot of potential. The huge complex was open but almost completely deserted. A kind volunteer lady staffed the admissions desk, but she appeared to be the only soul in the entire museum. We wandered around in the cavernous interior and saw some of the bones from the excavation. The visit was a bit tough on Kathleen, who had collected so many of the fossils only to see them displayed where there was currently so little audience to see them and no scientists to study them. The volunteer let us into the cavernous fossil collection facility where the results of the excavation were stored on huge shelves. We had a quiet afternoon, pulling drawers and looking at amazing fossils. This place clearly had tremendous potential, and we left hoping that someone would realize the opportunity. Fortunately, in the years after our visit, this has happened, and the Western Science Center has become another active node of southern California fossil zeal.
The Raymond Alf Museum on the campus of the Webb Schools in Claremont.
Our next stop was a peculiar pair of high schools that give Hogwarts a run for its money. For years, I had been hearing about the Webb Schools east of Los Angeles, which trained their students to be professional paleontologists. Malcolm McKenna, the famous American Museum paleontologist who launched the museum’s second wave of expeditions to the Gobi Desert of Mongolia, was an alumnus, as was Dan Fisher, Michigan’s mastodon and mammoth guru. Another alumnus was David Webb, Florida’s Ice Age animal expert, who popularized the great interchange of mammals that happened between North and South America after the formation of the Isthmus of Panama. Ray and I decided that it was time for us to show up at the Webb Schools in Claremont and see what all of the fuss was about. I called ahead and discovered that Don Lofgren, a friend of mine, was now the director of the campus’s Raymond Alf Museum.
We drove into a lovely understated campus that was built around an octagonal building that turned out to be the museum. We were met by Don Lofgren and Ashley Hall, a delightfully fossil-obsessed woman whom we had met the previous week at the natural history museum in Los Angeles. Ashley had picked up the fossil bug at the age of five and would relentlessly pester her parents to drive her from their home in South Bend, Indiana, to the Field Museum in Chicago. “All I ever wanted for Christmas was a trip to the museum. I knew all of the genera and species.” She was living the dream by working at both the LA museum and at the Raymond Alf Museum, commuting the entire width of the LA Basin to appease her love for fossils.
Ashley Hall proudly presents the cast of a skeleton of Amphicyon, a Miocene bear dog that roamed the West.
The museum was full of excellent fossils and photographs of decades of field trips. It was also a temple to the memory of the man named Raymond Alf, a sprinter who came to Los Angeles to run for the LA Track Club in 1929. Since sprinting is not a career, Alf got a job teaching science at the Webb School (at the time, a boys-only school). At some point, he learned that there were fossils near Barstow, California, and, in 1936, he went there with some students from the school. One of the students found a fossil skull, and Alf took it to Pasadena to meet the paleontologist Chester Stock, who identified it as a peccary and published a description of it the next year. Alf would later say that the peccary skull lit the “flames of enthusiasm” in him. He was clearly one of those obsessed and inspiring individuals who finds their voice while cajoling high school kids. He was soon organizing “Peccary Trips” where he formed boys into bands and marched them off into the deserts of California, Nevada, Arizona, and the Rocky Mountain West in search of fossils and manhood. These trips grew to be the stuff of legends, and, now coed, they continue to happen to this day. By the mid-1960s, the collections from these expeditions had grown so large that Alf convinced the school to build its own museum to house them. The cult of the peccary created a steady stream of southern Californian high school students who were more than ready for careers in paleontology. It was Good Will Hunting meets Jurassic Park, and it brought high school students into regular contact with active scientists. Many of the students went on to become scientists in their own right, and the Webb Schools became a veritable engine for paleontology. Alf died in 1999 at the ripe old age of ninety-three, but the engine is still running and the school is still churning out peccary-obsessed paleontologists.
The museum we walked into was full of all sorts of fossils, photos, and supporters of Alf. We met an older gentleman named Dick Lynas, who was Webb School class of 1955 and a veteran of many Peccary Trips. He showed us rows of giant titanothere skulls that were named by Alf for the boys that found them, including one named Richard. We were given Ray Alf swag, including a splendid snow globe complete with Alf reaching for the sky.
Dick Lynas and the titanothere skull he found as a teenager.
Ray Alf’s quest, forever memorialized in a snow globe.
All of this made me want to visit Barstow to see the place that had lit Alf’s flame. Barstow is a small town that lies about halfway between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Historically, it is a place where trails, railroads, and highways crossed, so lots of people have been through Barstow but not so many have stopped. About 8 miles north of town lie the Rainbow Basin Badlands, an isolated patch of tilted and layered rocks that have been yielding a steady stream of fossils since the 1930s.
Beginning in the 1870s, paleontologists began finding more and more fossil sites across western North America, and it rapidly became clear that wave after wave of mammal species had lived on the continent. Really good fossil sites became exemplars of certain time periods, and the Rainbow Basin was one such site. Its rocks were deposited just about 13.8 million years ago, and the assemblage of animals from this time period was given the name “Barstovian” after the fossils found near Barstow. These time period names for groups of mammal species are known as “North American Land Mammal Ages” or “NALMAs.” Now you know some real paleontological jargon!
In addition to the much-admired peccaries, the Barstovian world also hosted horses, camels, oreodonts, bear dogs, dogs, cats, and rhinos. The Barstovian mammal that really catches my attention, however, is the gomphothere. This was a weird animal related to elephants and with tusks like an elephant. It’s just that it had four tusks, not two. Two tusks projected straight out of the end of their lower jaw, while two more emerged at wider angles from the skull. The animals were big, but not as big as elephants. Their earliest occurrence anywhere in North America is here in Barstow, and the prevailing wisdom is that they wandered onto the continent along an earlier version of the Bering Land Bridge and quickly colonized the New World like so many species before and after.
The tilted layers of mudstone and sandstone in the Rainbow Basin near Barstow hold evidence of the first elephants in North America.
The Australian mammologist Tim Flannery once spent a year in Boston studying the evolution of the North American mammal faunas. With his fresh eyes, he came up with a great analogy that he published in his book The Eternal Frontier. He argues that North America is like a room with three doors, and that mammal species enter and depart the continent through these portals. The first door was the Bering Land Bridge, a strip of land that connected Siberia and Alaska when the sea level was low. The second was the Isthmus of Panama, and the third was the land connection that linked Greenland and Scandinavia before the North Atlantic widened and severed it.
The Bering Land Bridge, often called Beringia, appears to have been intermittently open for something like 100 million years. The Panama Isthmus formed as South America drifted into contact with the lower part of Central America approximately 3 million years ago. The connection to Scandinavia is just the opposite, as it was broken rather than formed by the drifting of the continents. It was open about 60 million years ago but stopped being functional around 30 million years ago.
These three connections are known not only by their actual geology but also by fossil sites that tell the story of which species could travel between continents and when they traveled. Because fossils are only found in places where sediment was deposited, little patches of fossil-rich land take on unusual significance. It is for this reason that the first known gomphotheres in North America are from the Barstow area, and from that information we deduce that the Bering Land Bridge was open for business around 13.8 million years ago.
The paleontologists who figure this out have to find and excavate the fossils; figure out the sequence of rocks they occur in; prepare, illustrate, and describe the fossils; and roll all of this information into a narrative that is in constant revision. To complicate matters even more, the scientists are specialists who group themselves by the fossils they study. The plant, shell, and mammal paleontologists all go to different conferences, use different terminology, and have different priorities. Yet somehow they have begun to stitch together the complicated history of California.
The glue that holds paleontologists together are the papers they publish and the museums full of fossils. With these two critical elements, the thread of the story can persist and grow while careers come and go.
And over time, specific sites have continued to yield fossils, bringing back generations of paleontologists. The Rainbow Basin of Barstow was one of these sites; another was Sharktooth Hill near the dusty town of Oildale, not far from Bakersfield where Larry Barnes from the NHM had found his bone bed. As a West Coast fossil kid, I grew up hearing about a mythical place near Bakersfield where there was a hill full of giant shark teeth. My grandparents lived in Fresno, and they had friends who were rock hounds who had a lot of shark teeth. I wanted those teeth badly.
A shark tooth from Sharktooth Hill near Bakersfield.
In 1977, my grandfather Elmer passed away; my grandmother Flo followed him the next year. Elmer had been a gardener, so when my mother and I flew to Fresno in 1978 to clean out the family home, I found myself with an amazing inheritance that included a 1957 Chevy pickup truck and a garage full of digging tools. For a kid who hoped to someday become a paleontologist, this was an unexpected and extravagant bonanza. We spent the week sorting and selling items, and then I asked my mom for a favor. It is only 110 miles from Fresno to Bakersfield, and I figured that my mom and I had everything we needed to make an assault on Sharktooth Hill. Being the mom that she was, she agreed and we headed south.
The Marine Animal Fossils Found at Sharktooth Hill
Looking back on it, I am amazed that I had enough information to get lucky. But get lucky I did. We drove to Oildale and up into a series of dusty hills looking for holes in the ground, and we immediately found them. I could not believe my luck; the holes were full of broken fossil bones and shark teeth. While my mom hung out in the truck and read magazines, I conducted my own personal excavation. At the time, I did not consider the fact that I was more than a hundred miles from the Pacific Ocean or, for that matter, whose property I was on. I was just plain giddy that I had a pickup truck and I could drive it across the landscape and find amazing fossils.
What I did not know at the time was that the bone beds of Oildale are some of the richest marine mammal sites in the world. They are so prolific that they were found soon after the California Gold Rush. The famous Harvard fish paleontologist Louis Agassiz was publishing on these fossils by the 1850s, well before the discovery of the fossil fields of the Rocky Mountains. Another famous fish paleontologist and founding president of Stanford University David Starr Jordan did research on the Sharktooth Hill sharks in the 1920s.
Sharktooth Hill is composed of sand deposited by a huge, shallow sea that filled what is now the Central Valley of California some 15 to 16 million years ago, and the bone beds in Oildale hold millions of bones of just about everything that lived in the sea as well as the animals that lived along its shores. The census of ancient marine life is massive and includes whales, dolphins, pinnipeds, sharks, other marine fish, seabirds, marine turtles, and our beloved desmostylians. In addition to the marine mammals, the bone bed contains the remains of land mammals that washed out to sea, including animals as diverse as true cats, bear dogs, horses, tapirs, rhinoceroses, camels, and gomphotheres.
By the 1930s, this was a major destination for paleontologists who were trying to understand the evolution of marine mammals. One of these was Remington Kellogg, an Iowa boy who studied paleontology at Berkeley before coming to the Smithsonian in 1928. In 1948, he became the director of the National Museum of Natural History (the position I now hold) and went on to found the International Whaling Commission. His early papers describe fossils from Sharktooth Hill.
Larry Barnes made his first forays to Sharktooth Hill in the 1950s, and he has been studying the fossils ever since. In 1983, he started removing layers of overburden with bulldozers to expose the bone bed and study how it came to be. After several studies, it became clear that rather than being formed by some mass stranding, the layer of bones represented a time period when strong currents washed sediment along the seafloor rather than letting it accumulate, so the only things that piled up were the carcasses of animals that died in the water column. A long period of no sand resulted in a dense layer of bones.
Many other paleontologists have studied these rich fossil beds, but one of them was a young amateur from Lincoln City, Oregon, named Doug Emlong. On April 15, 1975, Emlong found a complete pinniped skeleton at a place called Pyramid Hill. The site was a bit older than the main bone bed, and the fossil, now named Enaliarctos mealsi, is the oldest known pinniped in the world. When I discovered this fact, I realized that while I was digging a random hole in 1978, I was not far from where Doug Emlong had been making significant discoveries just three years earlier.
The site continues to be excavated and studied by scientists, dug by amateurs, and mined by commercial fossil diggers. One of the latter, Bob Ernst, actually bought parcels of land so that he could mine marine mammal fossils. A lot of his fossils ended up in the Buena Vista Museum of Natural History in Bakersfield, which offers summer digs for kids older than twelve during the summer.
A scimitar cat (Homotherium) and dire wolf lower jaws from the Fairmead Landfill in Chowchilla.
Ray and I drove north from Bakersfield into the broad expanse of California’s Central Valley. What had been a sea during the Miocene had eventually filled in to become a vast plain. Early explorers to California’s Central Valley pronounced it a wildlife paradise, describing endless flocks of migratory birds and vast herds of elk, antelope, and deer. They also talked about the ferocious California grizzly bear as a danger of the open grassland. When my great-grandparents arrived in Fresno from Nebraska in 1905, the valley was well on its way to becoming America’s most productive agricultural landscape, and they set about growing grapefruit, peaches, raisins, and almonds.
Ray and I went to Fresno to meet up with Bob Dundas, who was studying a newly discovered fossil site in Fairmead, and we met him and his friend Jim Chatters at his office at Cal State– Fresno. Back in May of 1993, the nearby town of Chowchilla had started excavating a giant pit to serve as an extension of the Madera County Fairmead Landfill. Workers were surprised when a mammoth tusk appeared more than 30 feet below the land surface, and they were forced to bring in mitigation paleontologists to monitor the site as they dug. It turned out to be unusually rich, and the monitoring continues to this day. A small museum has even sprung up next to it.
After a few decades of research, it is clear that the site is about 780,000 years old, nearly twenty times older than La Brea. Fossils from this time period are known as Irvingtonian after a site discovered in Irvington, California, in the 1930s. This was a time before bison had moved over the Bering Land Bridge into North America, so while there were many of the same animals found at La Brea and Hemet, there were no bison. We spent a few hours inspecting fossils from the site that Bob had in his office. He had three different kinds of ground sloths – Megalonyx, Paramylodon, and Nothrotheriops – and four different types of carnivorous cats – the saber-toothed cat, the scimitar cat (Homotherium), a panther-like cat, and a cheetah. In addition to these were fossils from the short-faced bear and the dire wolf (Canis dirus). This was starting to look like a very dangerous dump.
Three guys and three ground sloths: Kirk, Jim Chatters, and Bob Dundas holding megalonyx, paramylodon, and Nothrotheriops.
Bob had to teach a class, but Jim had time on his hands so he agreed to accompany us to the dump. As we drove north, I put two and two together and realized where I had heard the name Jim Chatters before. He confirmed that he had been the archaeologist who collected an 8,900-year-old human skeleton on the banks of the Columbia River in Washington in 1996. The skeleton, which was one of the most complete ancient humans ever found in North America, came to be known as Kennewick Man. The discovery quickly grew controversial, as the local Umatilla people claimed the skeleton as theirs and anthropologists clamored to study the remarkable find. Chatters had become embroiled in the politics when he suggested that the skull did not look like a Native American but might instead have been from as far away as Siberia. It took nineteen years, lots of legal wrangling, and a whole lot of science before the analysis of ancient DNA did make the connection between Kennewick Man and Washington’s Colville Indians.
Ray peppered Jim with questions as we drove to Chowchilla, and it was clear that the Kennewick discovery was still a pretty sensitive topic. Since Jim had worked extensively in Washington, we shifted the conversation to other things, and Ray learned that Jim was a big fan of ratfish. Ray sometimes calls himself Ratfish Ray, so the conversational unease had cleared by the time we arrived at a city building in Chowchilla where the fossils from the dump dig were being stored.
Jim had been curating the thousands of specimens from the landfill and showed us around the old office building that had become a fossil repository. The bones from the dump were fractured, white, and crumbly, but they were definitely good enough to display the biological diversity of the ancient Central Valley. Despite the long list of carnivores, the most common fossils were herbivores, and the single most common herbivore was a species of horse that accounted for 61 percent of all the fossils (camels were 21 percent and sloths were 7 percent). Other interesting plant eaters included mammoths, a tiny antelope (Caprimyrex), a huge camel (Camelops), and an elk-sized llama (Hemiauchenia).
We were eager to see the actual site and arrived at the Fossil Discovery Center of Madera County to be greeted by a sour, penetrating odor that I don’t usually associate with fossils. It was Tuesday, and Jim said that Tuesdays were always a bad day to be at the dump. I couldn’t place the smell, but Jim referred to it as Diaper Tuesday and that made sense. It was clear that they had located the museum a little too close to the dump. The site was out in the center of the broad Central Valley and there was no tar here. The excavation in the dump itself showed that the fossils were buried in a deposit that was simply a layer of sand that had washed into the valley in a drier time.
The museum was full of tourists captivated by skeletons of the short-faced bear, ground sloth, and giant camel. A mammoth skull was hung from the rafters like a giant, bizarre ceiling fan. These were the early days for a museum that had only opened in 2010, and we understand that the floating mammoth skull now has a skeleton underneath it.
We left Jim at the museum and headed toward Berkeley, where we had agreed to do a book-signing event at seven that night. By four thirty, we were driving through oak-covered hills near Danville in Contra Costa County, and I remembered an old fossil story that connected the Seattle Seahawks with shovel-tusked elephants. I promised Ray that we had time to squeeze in one more fossil stop and still make it to the bookstore on time. He didn’t believe me – and he was right – but we stopped anyway.
The floating mammoth skull at the Fossil Discovery Center of Madera County in Chowchilla.
A little background: A number of years ago while bartending for a party at the Explorer’s Club in New York promoting the reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone, I met a woman who told me that her brother, Ted Daeschler, was an environmental paleontologist. Even though I was a paleontologist, I had never heard of that title, and it baffled me until I finally ran into Ted in Philadelphia and learned that he studied paleoenvironments. That made more sense to me, and I learned that he had earned a master’s degree at the University of California at Berkeley by studying a 9-million-year-old fossil site in California: the Black Hawk Ranch Quarry. This was our pre-book-signing destination.
Ray hikes up a muddy road in Contra Costa County in search of the Blackhawk Quarry.
The Black Hawk Ranch Quarry is located on the slopes of Mount Diablo in the eastern San Francisco Bay area, and we just happened to be driving down Black Hawk Road when I had remembered the story about Ted. So, with some quick sleuthing on my iPhone, I was able to predict where we might find the quarry. It had just stopped raining, the sun had come back out, and the afternoon light was brilliant. By my calculation, we had to hike about a half mile up a steep dirt road to get to the spot where I hoped to find the quarry.
The road was soaked from the rain, and soon our shoes were coated in slippery mud that built up until we were slogging along on top of giant mud balls. Ray was skeptical, but I was pretty sure that we were headed in the right direction. Vindication came after about thirty minutes, when the road intersected with a very distinct human-made slash in the hill. The cut was only about 40 feet long and 10 feet deep, but it bore the clear signs of having been dug. The rock layers were tipped such that they were nearly vertical, and after a few minutes of crawling, we found a small piece of fossil bone. It wasn’t much, but it was evidence that we were in the right spot.
Fossils were first found here in 1926 when the property was owned by the uncle of legendary landscape photographer Ansel Adams. Then, in 1937, the task of digging the site was assigned to the curiously named King Arthur Richey. It was during the Depression, and several Works Progress Administration workers were assigned to the project. It wasn’t long before King Arthur and his diggers hit pay dirt and began extracting amazing plants and animals from the small quarry. Bones, teeth, and skulls emerged, and the list grew to include foxes, rabbits, beavers, pond turtles, deer-sized horses (Hipparion), camels (Procamelus), two kinds of llamas (Pliauchenia and Megatylopus), a ring-tailed cat (Bassariscus), a cougar-like cat (Pseudaelurus), a bone-crushing dog (Epicyon), a hyena-like dog (Aelurodon), and a large number of those shovel-tusked, elephant-like gomphotheres (Gomphotherium simpsoni). Later, as we researched the site, we learned that it had also produced the bones of Oncorhynchus rastrosus, the giant spike-toothed salmon. And while it is unusual for plants and animals to be preserved in the same quarry, this place also had leaves of poplars, elms, willows, sycamores, oaks, and sumacs.
King Arthur had excavated an entire Miocene world, and it was one that had formed just after the sea that once filled the Central Valley had drained. It was the first view of California as we know it, except that it had gomphotheres and giant salmon. Because of its rich fauna and flora, this was one of the first sites to be reconstructed as an ancient environment, a task taken by the artist William Gordon Huff, whose views of this world were exhibited in 1939. In 1941, King Arthur moved to Los Angeles, but the paleontologists at Berkeley continued picking away at the site for decades.
In 1975, Ken Behring, a developer and future owner of the Seattle Seahawks, purchased the property with the intent to build 4,800 homes. After much wrangling and local opposition, he decided to reduce the size of the development to 2,400 homes and to gift the quarry to the University of California. Ken was an eclectic collector of wild game mounts and rare cars. In 1991, he opened an automotive/natural history museum in Black Hawk. For its first six years, the museum had an exhibit of the Black Hawk quarry’s fossils, and it was possible to see gomphotheres in amongst a hundred vintage cars. In 2003, he funded the Kenneth E. Behring Hall of Mammals at the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian.
There was a lot of history in that small quarry on the side of the hill, and we ended up being late for our own book signing.
