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A construction project at a Los Angeles high school uncovered millions of marine fossils starting in 2022. The group overseeing fossil recovery made new discoveries as recently as this summer and then presented the findings to students at the school. From LAist, Mariana Dale reports.
MARIANA DALE, BYLINE: San Pedro High School sits on a Los Angeles peninsula that was once covered by the ocean. In June 2022, construction workers were digging a trench for a renovation project. They unearthed a dense layer of 120,000-year-old shells beneath the school's former home economics building.
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WAYNE BISCHOFF: This is a unicorn site. It is so unique.
DALE: That's Wayne Bischoff. The district hired the company he works for to monitor the school's renovation project for paleontological discoveries.
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BISCHOFF: I've been doing this for 30 years. I've never heard of a site that was this rich before.
DALE: Subsequent digging revealed even older fossils, including from the largest shark to ever live. The find stands out because of its size and diversity. More than 200 species have been identified so far, including clams, fish, birds, turtles, whales, and kelp. Bischoff says his favorite fossil is the jawbone of an extinct saber-tooth salmon.
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BISCHOFF: It's the entire ecosystem from an age that's gone, and yet we have all this evidence to help future researchers put together what an entire ecology looked like 9 million years ago.
DALE: Bischoff recently presented the findings to a group of students at San Pedro High School, including Senior Taya Olson, who says she never imagined there was so much history right under her feet.
TAYA OLSON: The fact that it's here and we get to learn more about it, and it's going to, like, spur more discovery and more information that we get to learn later on is just something that I'm really, really excited about.
DALE: Multiple tons of fossils were excavated from the school over the last two years. Many of the specimens were transferred to the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, where Austin Hendy is the assistant curator of invertebrate paleontology. He says, once all the species are identified, researchers will try to reconstruct the world they lived in.
AUSTIN HENDY: To really try to understand how ecosystems function, how they've changed through time...
DALE: The fossil find also creates opportunities for aspiring paleontologists. San Pedro High senior Milad Esfahani interned at the museum this summer.
MILAD ESFAHANI: Hands-on stuff is a lot more of an educator than a textbook.
DALE: After the slideshow that Bischoff presented at the school, Esfahani shows me how he helped catalog the fossils.
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DALE: He picks up a white shell from the tray and points out small details, like the ridge pattern on the clamshell. That helped him ID what it was.
MILAD: These things are super old, and I'm actually able to hold this. So first couple of days, it was like, a lot of shock. But eventually, I was like, wow, this is, you know, super cool.
DALE: After he graduates, Esfahani plans to study marine paleontology in college.
For NPR News, I'm Mariana Dale in Los Angeles.
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