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posted by chromas on Monday July 20 2020, @03:33AM   Printer-friendly
from the not-a-new-discovery-for-this-region-but-we-made-it-the-title-anyhow dept.

Freeway project unearths a time when camels roamed San Diego:

At a freeway construction project in Otay Mesa, paleontologists have found fossils that may open a window into what this part of the world looked like about 15 million years ago.

It was a place where early camels roamed, and prehistoric hoofed mammals, and probably a carnivore or two. And where volcanoes erupted.

“The finds suggest that we have a whole new chapter of our history that we get to explore,” said Thomas Deméré, curator of paleontology at San Diego Natural History Museum and director of its PaleoServices team, which located the fossils while monitoring the freeway project.

The discovery in June joins a roster of significant unearthings during construction projects in San Diego County — mastodons, dire wolves, sea cows, giant sloths, armored dinosaurs — that are painting a fuller picture of the region and how it’s changed over time.

[...] “We found a concentration of vertebrate fossils, limb bones and jaws from a variety of mammals,” Deméré said. “We found the upper teeth of an early horse, the first horse fossils found here that are older than 3 million years.”

They also unearthed remains of a camel — not a new discovery for this region, but always interesting. A lot of people are surprised to learn camels originated in North America before moving to Europe and Asia. They became extinct here about 11,000 years ago.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 20 2020, @01:08PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 20 2020, @01:08PM (#1024074)

    I'm not sure what that's got to do with this. Camels originated in what is now Canada as cold climate animals. they migrated and evolve as one group made its way towards the middle East and another group that went to south America.

    The fossils shouldn't be that surprising as this is between Canada and South America.