Story at a glance
- Prehistoric fossils were found in the Mokelumne River Watershed in California by a municipal utility worker last summer.
- A team from CSU Chico’s Department of Geological and Environmental Sciences has since been excavating several miles of the land.
- So far, researchers have found fossils of a two-tusked mastodon, a four-tusked gomphothere, rhinoceros, camel, horse, bird, fish, tortoise and tapir.
Among the fossilized remains of giant camels and prehistoric fish, a California ranger stumbled on the bones of a now extinct four-tusked predecessor to mammoths and mastodons: a gomphothere.
“It started with me being at the right place at the right time and having an eye for something that was a bit out of place,” Greg Francek, who spotted the fossils while on patrol last summer for the East Bay Municipal Utility District (EBMUD), told The Guardian. “I didn’t realize what I was looking at was actually the remains of great beasts that had walked this area millions of years before.”
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The prehistoric fossils were found on 28,000 acres of land surrounding the Mokelumne River, called Wakalumitch by the Plains and Sierra Miwok who originally inhabited the area along with other Indigenous peoples and tribes. Today, the watershed is managed by the EBMUD and serves 1.4 million people in the San Francisco East Bay.
“This historic discovery has revealed that the Mokelumne Watershed plays a much deeper role in our understanding of the natural history of North America,” said EBMUD Board President Doug Linney, in a release. “It is simply wondrous that these fossils will help fill gaps in our understanding of the formation of the region and planet.”
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After the extinction of dinosaurs and before humans evolved into their modern day form, gomphotheres and then mastodons walked the Earth in the age during the Miocene epoch: the age of mammals. Now extinct, the latter are distant ancestors of modern day elephants who lived in North and Central America. In fact, fossilized remains of a mastodon have been found in the area before, during an EBMUD pipeline construction in 1947, and much of the area is protected under the United States Paleontology Resources Preservation Act and the Municipal Utility District Act.
To maintain the security of the fossils while they continue to excavate, researchers have not disclosed the exact location of the site, but are sharing their findings with the public online.
“I can look out and picture a movie reel of the lands changing. Through the trees, I see one group of elephants peek out as another walks by, and then great horses come in,” said Russell Shapiro, a professor at California State University, Chico, in a release from the university. “You think about what that all means. I’m really envisioning how this landscape is changing.”
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Published on May 27,2021