Park Ranger Stumbles Upon Treasure Trove of Several-Million-Year-Old Fossils in Northern California
In the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in California, paleontologists have uncovered a collection of fossils, including an eight-million-year-old mastodon skull with both tusks intact, a rhino skeleton, a giant tortoise, 600 petrified trees, and many more specimens. Dating back to the Miocene epoch, the site is considered one of the most significant fossil discoveries in California history, reports Andrew Chamings for SFGate.
"Few other fossil discoveries like this exist in California," says California State University paleontologist Russell Shapiro, to Ashley Gebb for Chico State Today. Park ranger and naturalist Greg Francek from the East Bay Municipal Utility District (EBMUD) first stumbled upon a petrified forest while on patrol in the Mokelumne River Watershed, located in the Sierra Nevada, reports the Chico State Today.
I looked around the area further, and I found a second tree," Francek says in a statement. "And then a third and so on. After finding dozens of trees, I realized that what I was looking at was the remains of a petrified forest." After three weeks of surveying and uncovering more fossilized pieces of the forest, Francek found what appeared to be vertebrate fossils, Chico State Today reports. From there, EBMUD reached out to paleontologists and geologists from California State University, Chico, to take a closer look.
Shapiro's team excavated the site and uncovered the tip of a pearly, white bone. As the team etched away at the rock encasing the bone, teeth, a skull, and two tusks belonging to the elephant-like, eight-million-year-old mastodon ... In the past year since the initial discovery, Shapiro and his team have found hundreds of animal fossils from varying species within the site of the petrified forest remains. Among the finds were a horse, a tapir, the remains of an ancestral 400-pound salmon with sharp teeth, an extinct species of camel that was as tall as a giraffe, and a gomphothere, which is an ancient elephant with four tusks, SFGate reports.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/treasure-trove-fossils-unearthed-california-watershed-180977796/
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What it looked like:
It is thought that gomphotheres may have diverged from the evolutionary lineage of mammoths (Mammuthus) and modern elephants sometime after the emergence of the mastodon (Mastodon, or Mammut). However, it is possible that elephants and mammoths may be the direct descendants of gomphotheres.
https://www.britannica.com/animal/gomphothere
