‘Entire ecosystem’ of fossils 8.7m years old found under Los Angeles high school

Marine fossils dating back to as early as 8.7m years ago have been uncovered beneath a south Los Angeles high school.

On Friday, the Los Angeles Times reported that researchers had discovered two sites on the campus of San Pedro high school under which fossils including those of a saber-toothed salmon and a megalodon, the gigantic prehistoric shark, were buried.

According to the outlet, the two sites where the fossils were found include an 8.7m-year-old bone bed from the Miocene era and a 120,000-year-old shell bed from the Pleistocene era.

The discoveries were made between June 2022 and July 2024, LAist reports .

In a statement to the Los Angeles Times, Richard Behl, a California State University at Long Beach geologist, said that researchers were testing the chemical and mineral composition of the fossils.

“We got to find clues and piece those clues together,” Behl said, adding that fossils from the Miocene era were encased in diatomite, a sedimentary rock composed of the fossilized skeletal remains of single-cell aquatic algae. According to Behl, the diatomite indicates that the area was rich with algae, which helped foster a rich ecosystem that comprised various marine creatures.

Echoing Behl, Wayne Bischoff, the director of cultural resources at Envicom Corporation, told LAist: “It’s the entire ecosystem from an age that’s gone … We have all this evidence to help future researchers put together what an entire ecology looked like nine million years ago. That’s really rare.”

Photos published on LAist and in the Los Angeles Times feature a vertebrae fossil and rib bone of an extinct dolphin species, jawbone of an extinct saber-tooth salmon, which had extendable fangs from its mouth, and fossils of hundreds of small fish vertebrae.

Speaking to KABC, Austin Hendy, assistant curator at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, said that researchers believe “there was a submarine channel that was carrying material down from shallower water into deeper water and volcanism going on somewhere in the vicinity”.

“This was a big surprise to everybody when they started digging these trenches to unearth these fish fossils,” Hendy added.

According to the Los Angeles Times, the fossils have been distributed among research and educational institutions, including the Los Angeles unified school district, the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium in San Pedro, California State University Channel Islands and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

In a statement to KABC, the LAUSD superintendent, Alberto Carvalho, said that the discovery of the fossils had “led to a new era of concentrative studies that will bring notoriety to this community and this high school”.