Nine Million Year Old 'Treasure' 🪙Discovered Under Los Angeles School

Experts have discovered thousands of marine fossils dating back 8.7 million years under a high school south of Los Angeles.

The Los Angeles Times reported Friday that researchers have discovered two sites at San Pedro High School that are buried with fossils, including those of a sharp-toothed salmon and a megalodon, a giant prehistoric shark.

According to the newspaper, the two sites where the fossils were found include an 8.7-million-year-old Miocene bone layer and a 120,000-year-old shell bone layer from the Pleistocene. The discoveries were made between June 2022 and July 2024.

In a statement to the Los Angeles Times, Richard Bell, a geologist at California State University, Long Beach, said the researchers were testing the chemical and mineral composition of the fossils.

“We were able to find evidence and connect that evidence,” he said, adding that the Miocene fossils were covered in diatomite, a sedimentary rock made up of the fossilized skeletal remains of single-celled aquatic algae. According to Bell, the diatomite suggests the area was rich in algae, which helped foster a rich ecosystem with many marine organisms.

“It’s a whole ecosystem from a bygone era,” said Wayne Bischoff, director of cultural resources at Envicom Corporation, an environmental, biological and land-use planning consultancy. “We have all this evidence to help future researchers piece together what the entire ecosystem looked like nine million years ago. That’s really rare.”

Austin Hinde, assistant curator at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, said the researchers believe “there’s an underwater channel that’s moving material from the shallow waters to the deep waters and that there’s volcanic activity going on somewhere in the vicinity. That was a big surprise to everyone when they started digging these trenches to extract these fish fossils.”

Source: The Guardian