Hundreds of fossils have been discovered beneath a California high school in a discovery that could rewrite the state’s history.
San Pedro High School in Los Angeles County was still under construction when workers unearthed fossils dating back nearly nine million years.
While construction at the site was halted, researchers discovered 80 percent of the vast collection, including parts of whales and birds and teeth from saber-toothed salmon, megalodon sharks and other fish.
The find suggests that Southern California was once underwater and may reveal the possibility that a now-extinct island existed to the west of the site.
Construction workers discovered fossils buried beneath San Pedro High School in Southern California that are nearly nine million years old
Fossils that had been at the site for millions of years were found spread across two locations on the San Pedro campus.
This led to a huge job from June 2022 to July 2024 to remove the fossils before construction of the school could continue.
At one site, researchers from Envicom Corporation, which was hired to monitor and supervise the excavation, found a bone layer dating to the Miocene, about 8.7 million years ago, and a shell layer dating to the Pleistocene, about 120,000 years ago.
“It’s the whole ecosystem of an era that’s gone by,” said Wayne Bischoff, director of cultural resources at Envicom Corp. BBC.
“We have all this evidence to help future researchers piece together what an entire ecology looked like nine million years ago. That’s really rare.”
According to Austin Hendy, assistant curator at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, the way the fossils are laid out is reminiscent of where the coastline met the sea nine million years ago.
“I could see the coastline in three dimensions, and I could see all the fossils, all the organisms that lived on that coastline and washed up on that beach,” he said. Company Insider.
The fossils consisted of bones from fish and marine mammals and teeth from megalodon sharks that could grow up to 18 centimeters long.
The megalodon was three times longer than a great white shark and could grow up to six meters in length.
The fossils include bones of whales, birds and other marine mammals, as well as teeth from fish, the megalodon shark and the sabre-toothed salmon.
Also discovered for the first time were teeth from the saber-toothed salmon, never before seen in Southern California.
This mammal was a prehistoric salmon with a pair of pointed teeth protruding from the side of its skull.
The saber-toothed salmon was 8 to 10 feet long and weighed between 200 and 400 pounds.
While most of the fossils came from marine animals, the researchers also discovered the skull of a sandpaper bird that lived more than eight million years ago.
The find suggests the bird visited an island west of the school and changes the way scientists view California’s geologic history.
“When I saw a wading bird, and also a lot of horsetail plants, I started thinking that an island beach was the origin of all the fossil material,” Bischoff told Business Insider.
Excavations at San Pedro High School (pictured) began in June 2022 and continued until July 2024.
The island could have disappeared over thousands of years due to the weight of volcanic debris released by eruptions.
This created a chasm where the fossils were preserved and accumulated over time. At the same time, the tectonic activity in the area, which caused earthquakes, caused these fossil layers to come closer to the surface.
“The volcanic ash contained many rare elements, such as iron, sulphur and manganese, which covered and protected some of the fossil material,” Bischoff told the BBC.
“It’s a real window into the geography of the oceans and the land at the time this happened,” Behl told the LA Times.
‘Even though it seems like a long time ago, it still has an impact on everything we have today.’
Researchers are now testing the mineral and chemical composition of the fossil to learn more about how these animals fossilized, hoping to gain more insight into the atmosphere and conditions of prehistoric environments.
‘After their experience on this site, [scientists] “We went looking for other extinct islands,” Bischoff told the LA Times.
Behl added: “We have to find clues and connect them together.”
The fossils are being held at the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles, but it has not yet been confirmed whether they will be open to the public.