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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printed from SoylentNews, Freeway Project Unearths a Time When Camels Roamed San Diego on 2024-04-27 23:32:29