Fossils
Shortly before the holidays, our curator Andrew McDonald and I were looking through one of our collections cabinets for a particular specimen from Murrieta, California. In the process we stumbled across a fragment of another tooth, recently prepared by a volunteer but not yet catalogued. Even though it was incomplete,
Snails
In our current exhibit "Life in the Slow Lane" one of the displays features fossil snails recovered from Pleistocene sediments during the Diamond Valley Lake excavation. Of the roughly 100,000 fossils recovered from DVL, over 4,000 were snails. These were pretty much all very small freshwater
Mastodon
As I mentioned last week, many of the Western Science Center's fossils are actually recovered by paleontology mitigation companies, thanks to California's robust protections for fossil resources. Most of these companies are highly skilled and professional and do a great job recovering the specimens and their
Paleontology
California is unusual among U.S. states in having relatively robust protections for fossil resources, even when they are not on public lands (most states have none at all). As part of the permitting process for real estate development, developers are supposed to provide for the collection and preservation of
Miocene
Besides the proboscidean tooth I talked about last week, our recent excavation in the Miocene Cajon Valley Formation turned up other interesting remains. Because these sediments were deposited in a fast-flowing stream bed, we don't typically find skeletons. Most of the identifiable remains are isolated teeth, and most
Paleontology
Last Monday, several of our staff members visited a fossil locality on National Forest Service land in San Bernardino County that we've been excavating for a number of years under an NFS permit. The deposit exposes a conglomerate of the Cajon Valley Formation, which is middle Miocene in