Geology & Fossils
Gaspar de Portola was among California’s early Spanish explorers. He made the following note in his diary on August 3, 1769: “The 3rd, we proceeded for three hours on a good road; to the right of it were extensive swamps of bitumen which is called chapapote. We debated whether this substance, which flows melted from underneath the earth, could occasion so many earthquakes.”
Portola was where the present city of Los Angeles now stands, in a region still famous for its earthquakes and tar, or “bitumen.” In fact, the Rancho La Brea tar pits are among the world’s most famous fossil sites. Portola might have shouted California’s motto, Eureka, “I have found it!” But California didn’t have a motto in 1760. In fact, California wasn’t even a state yet and Portola wasn’t looking for the fossils for which La Brea is now world famous.
Californiasaurus?
While the California gold rush later made California famous, the fossil gold rush was located far to the east, in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountain states. There, scientists and amateur collectors found the remains of enormous dinosaurs and spectacular marine reptiles.
California lie under ancient seas during much of the Age of Dinosaurs. Fossils of porpoise-like ichthyosaurs are found in the Great Basin, which stretches across Utah and Nevada into eastern California and Oregon. But, aside from marine reptiles and La Brea’s Ice Age mammals, California isn’t known for its spectacular fossils.
Diverse Fossils
Nevertheless, the Golden State boasts a great variety of fossils, as might be expected from its size and geographic diversity. Most California fossils represent animals that lived during the Cenozoic Era, the Age of Mammals. Consider the candidates for California state fossil.
An ammonite — a shelled mollusk related to octopuses and squids — was suggested. Other mollusks that were suggested were Turritella and Buchia because of the important roles they have played in the exploration for oil in California.
Another suggestion was Scalez petrolia. Merely a part of a soft-shelled snail, it looks like a fish-scale, hardly an exciting fossil. But Scalez was widely used in the development of the oil fields in the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley. It was probably the first fossil to be widely used in California.
But not all state fossil candidates were aquatic. Representing the land was the dawn redwood. A compromise between land and sea was Allodesmus kernesis, a sea lion that lived during the Miocene Epoch (5 to 22.5 million years ago). Discovered in California, almost all known fossils of Allodesmus have been found along the shores of the Pacific Ocean.
Of course, a fossil that looks like a fish-scale can hardly compete with a saber-toothed cat, which was adopted as California’s state fossil.
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