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Saturday morning top of the scroll: Ancient sea life thrived in Central Valley

Posted by: Maven on June 6, 2009 at 6:45 am

Something different for the top of the scroll today…. From the San Francisco Chronicle:

In a coastal bay fronting an ancient sea where Bakersfield now stands, the waters once swarmed with giant 40-foot sharks, ancestral seals larger than any known today, and the ancestors of countless other marine animals long extinct.

That was 15 million years ago, but evidence of their existence lies in a priceless layer of fossils where a team of scientists from UC Berkeley has discovered clues telling how that fantastic fossil-rich site known as Sharktooth Hill formed in the water and was exposed to the surface much, much later.

The area was shallow and rich with sea life. The marine animals lived and died there by the millions for as long as 700,000 years, the scientists say. And there is no evidence, they say, that the animals all died at once from some lethal red tide or in a violent earthquake. The loss of life there was gradual. Eventually, sediments buried the bones and created a fossil-rich underwater shelf that is arguably the richest “bone bed” in the world, the scientists say.

Much, much later, earthquakes heaved the undersea burial ground upward as the restless San Andreas Fault lurched and lurched again. Even more fossil layers were uncovered as sea-level surges during a long period of global warming finally subsided, the scientists said.

Read more from the San Francisco Chronicle by clicking here.

June 6, 2009 · Filed Under History

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