Fossil bone bed helps reconstruct life along California's ancient...(t the University of British Columbia. ....)

"If you look at the geology of this fossil bed, it's not intuitive how it formed," Pyenson said. "We really put together all lines of evidence, with the fossil evidence being a big part of it, to obtain a snapshot of that period of time."

Pyenson and his colleagues, totaling five UC Berkeley Ph.D.s and UC Berkeley integrative biology professor Jere Lipps, hope that the study will draw renewed attention to the bone bed, which Lipps said needs protection even though a small portion of it was added to the National Natural Landmark registry in 1976.

"This deposit, if properly developed, would look just like Dinosaur National Monument," said Lipps, referring to a popular park in Colorado and Utah. "(Sharktooth Hill) is actually much more extensive, and the top of the bone bed has complete, articulated skeletons of seals and other marine mammals."

One 12-foot-long fossil seal skeleton that Lipps helped excavate during the 50 years he has visited the bone bed was mounted and displayed for decades at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (NHM), which houses thousands of fossils excavated from the Sharktooth Hill deposits during expeditions in the 1960s and 1980s. Other collections are in the California Academy of Sciences, San Diego Natural History Museum, Buena Vista Museum of Natural History in Bakersfield, and UC Berkeley's Museum of Paleontology (UCMP), where students over the years have made studies of the bone bed's extinct sea turtles, sharks, marine mammals and seabirds. Lipps is a faculty curator in the UCMP.

The paper's other coauthors - all of whom obtained their Ph.D.s from UC Berkeley are Randall B. Irmis, now an assistant professor of geology and geophysics at the University of Utah, and Lawrence G. Barnes, Edward D. Mitchell Jr. and Samuel A. McLeod of NHM's Department of Vertebrate Paleontology.

When the bone bed formed between 15,900,000 and 15,200,000 y
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