Here is a rockfall from 2021 that is a part of my Rockfall Dynamics study site that reveals numerous storm events along with the fossilized creatures that are associated with them. I have been studying and documenting these rockfalls now for several decades and have identified a number of causal factors and numerous patterns and processes involving the coastal geology of this area of Monterey Bay. This study is revealing several never-before documented geological processes involved with coastal rockfall dynamics in active continental margins. In a couple of cases I have been able to reinforce my understanding by accurately predicting events and I hope to be able to eventually make novel non-invasive mitigation recommendations once I have enough longitudinal data.
I am pleased to announce that Pacific Paleontology has been chosen to be featured by the California Small Business Development Center as a Developing Success Story! I could not be more pleased by this recognition for all our hard work that we have been doing over the past year! The CalCoastalSBDC, the central California arm of the statewide organization, has been instrumental in our successes so far, in addition to helping our firm successfully acquire a $5,000.00 startup grant from the state! With these funds we have been able to purchase much-needed equipment to fill important gaps in our collecting, prepping, and archiving abilities as well as onboard essential business insurance. Here you can see some of the field and lab equipment used to extract and prepare the fossils. Large new acquisitions from the British firm Zoic for our “Velociraptor” and “TRex” laboratory air scribes and from Eastwing and Zog for our field hand tools. And of course big shoutouts to @Austin Hendy, @Charles L Powell, @Bobby Boessenecker, #lacmip, #santacruzmuseum, #ucmp, the #californiaacademyofsciences, and so many others for their ongoing instrumental support.
Pups and Paleo have a long long history together! Having a good dog or two along on a paleo dig makes the whole experience come alive, so to speak, and sets the tone for a wonderful time for all. Pups in paleo go back into antiquity from Mary Anning in the 18th century to Mary Leakey in the 19th. Anning, one of the most famous paleontologists in all of history, would regularly take her dog Tray along with her on fossil-hunting expeditions to the English seashore in search of extinct marine reptiles and other creatures. I can only imagine that Tray was named after one of Anning’s trays of fossils! Unfortunately, Tray met his fate with a seashore rockfall, something I know won’t befall Chaco or Yoshi because of what happened 46 years earlier.
In 1976 fate nearly intervened and took the life of my paleo pup Blackie and I when I was 16; a rockfall came down besides us both, shaking the ground, and my nerves, to this very day and making me once cautious for the rest of my life. Mary Leakey too would regularly travel with her dalmations on her expeditions in search of the ancestors of our own human lineage. In fact, on July 17th, 1959, Mary’s dalmations were with her when they discovered the famous Zinj, later scientifically named as Paranthropus boisei.
More recently, Jon Gopsill and his trusted paleo pups Poppy and Sam were on Stolford beach, England, around Christmas time when the pups discovered a nearly complete 190 million year old ichthyosaur skeleton! And today, on most every paleo dig except contract gigs on construction sites, one can expect to see these two digging-est dogs, Chaco and Yoshi, onsite helping PaPa with sniffing out bones and other fossils, digging, deterring poachers (or attracting them as the case may be), and general paleontological support. In addition to being my paleo pup support crew, they can mostly be found chasing each other, slobbering, pooping, eating sea weed, chewing driftwood, exploring, swimming in the ocean and chasing other dogs to play.
Included here in memoriam; The Blarb or Palo, our yellow lab, and Blackie, my black lab who were faithful paleo pups of ages gone by. Also let’s not forget our supportive paleo cats; my cat Singkoo shown here on my paleo desk in 1975 along with my fossil ledger and old Royal report typewriter.
We are wrapping up our first paleontological mitigation contract here in my hometown of Scotts Valley and we took this opportunity for a promotional marketing photoshoot over the weekend for our new business website. Pacific Paleontology was hired to monitor a small subdivision construction project here that involved digging down into the Santa Margarita Formation layer of rock, which is about 10-12 million years old. This is a rock layer that is common in our area, is one that I have been studying here for the past four decades, and have discovered many hundreds of fossils from, primarily sharks. The marine vertebrate fauna includes toothed and baleen whales, sharks, fish, rays, skates, dolphins, porpoises, sea turtles, birds, pinnipeds (eared and earless seals and primitive walruses), sirenians, and desmostylians, among others. Marine clams, snails, and other invertebrates also occur here and are highly diverse in the local region. Terrestrial vertebrates, such as camels and horses, as well as rare woody plants are also known to occur in the Santa Margarita. No fossils were uncovered during construction in the massive medium-grained unconsolidated sands that used to make up the bottom of the ocean here. Now that the grading is completed, Pacific Paleontology is tasked with producing the reports that will show compliance of the project to federal, state, and local legislation for the conservation of protected historical resources. These regulations are relatively new within the past 20 years, and our understanding of the evolutionary history of life in California and elsewhere has advanced significantly due to the recovery of fossils through these protections. As a coincidental aside, I worked closely onsite with Tracy Miller of MTM Tractor. As it turns out, Tracy and I have a history together! The last time we saw each other he was in jr. high and I was in high school and we were working together at a local restaurant in town; so we had some catching up to do! Small world!!!
I am incredibly excited to announce that after 42 years since its initial discovery, the Aptos Mastodon, Mammut sp., on exhibit at the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History, will be formally getting C-14 dated in the coming weeks! Discovered in a creekbed by then-high school student James Stanton, who was searching for antique bottles in the water just after the heavy storm surge of 1980, the skull has been on exhibit at the museum for the past 40 years. Fast forward to this week and the bone and plant samples, once I get them cleaned with distilled water of any attached sediment or other materials sticking to them, will be sent off to NOSAMS the National Ocean Sciences Accelerator Mass Spectrometry Lab, which is a part of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution! The three samples will consist of a fragment of the bone from the inside of the mastodon’s skull, called pneumatic bone due to its looking like swiss cheese, an exterior fragment of skull bone, and a piece of carbonized wood that was discovered in contact with the bone around the skull all those years ago. Specimens need to be younger than 50,000 years before present in order for the C-14 process to work, anything older and an indeterminate age is assigned. Back in 1980, during the reconstruction of the mastodon’s skull, the two largest pieces of its skull were painstakingly reunited over a two-year period, with hundreds of fragments leftover from the process. In true museum detective story fashion, the box that all the fragments were stored in remained unaccounted for over the past 3 years, until I was contacted last week with the amazing news that the box, untouched since I packed it away 40 years ago (see pics below), had been discovered once again! The river gravels that the skull was preserved in, an incredibly rare process, have never been absolutely dated, only relatively dated. What this means is that we might be able to assign an exact age to the mastodon and river sediments, if they are younger than 50,000 years old, instead of having a rough estimate of their age based on other rock layers nearby. And if the mastodon samples come back with an indeterminate age, that is also important information, for then we will be able to say that the sediments, and the mastodon, are older than 50k! And for those of you who may be wondering why in the world would the inside of a mastodon’s skull look like swiss cheese, well it has to do with biomechanics. All proboscideans; mammoths, mastodons, and elephants, have pneumatic bone (see sample pic below), or skull bone with large “air pockets” in it rather than solid bone due to it being much lighter than solid skull bone and yet still strong. Think of all that weight that the proboscidean has to hold up and out; so the lighter the better! Stay tuned in the coming weeks after the tests come back to learn… the rest of the story!
I could choose from among a wide range of amazing fossils to share for National Fossil Day and for this year there was no question which fossil I wanted to share and celebrate for its meaning. As I transition from many years in k-16 public science classrooms to many more years in business with Pacific Paleontology outside in the rock layers interacting with the fossils I love, I reflect back on the moments with my students. These moments all weld meaning onto my life, and mold who I have become with the unknowing direction my students have gifted to me. The gratitude this student expresses is beyond doubt a mutual one. This sincere fossil specimen-gift sums up the incredible joy and privilege I have had in being a science teacher so well and the beauty of the rock, the ink, the physical distance the specimen has traveled to get here, and the obvious love that my student had for this fossil. It is such a great symbol for me of the mutual gratitude that students and teachers share together in the learning process and it holds a place on my desk where I work daily as a reminder of my timeless purpose in life, beyond science, beyond fossils, teaching, and business. BTW the town of Solnhofen, Germany, is one of the most famous fossil sites in all of paleontology, home to the Solnhofen Limestone Formation, where one of the evolutionarily first fossil birds, Archaeopteryx, was first discovered. More info in the link below...
When a fossil is found in the rock, paleontologists don’t actually just dig the fossil itself out of the rock but they remove it along with a block of the surrounding rock, called matrix, to later be prepared further in the lab. Like this 4 million year old ?Macoma sp. clam you see here, the matrix needs to be carefully cut back or completely removed, depending upon the fragility of the fossil. Here you see traditional hand pick removal of the matrix, which fine-tunes the block for later compact storage in a public museum! That method is about to be augmented with pneumatic help.
With our new small business development grant I’ll be purchasing two new air scribes; the “Velociraptor Mark II” and the “T. rex” from Zoic Palaeotech. I’ve wanted air scribes for quite awhile, but have never been able to afford them for prep work until now! Looking forward to upping my prep game now that my business is off the ground.
I am pleased to announce that “Pacific Paleontology”, our new paleontological mitigation venture, has been chosen to receive a $5000.00 U.S. Small Business Administration Dream Fund Grant! The grant will be used to buy essential equipment that is needed to effectively preserve and archive fossil discoveries made at local construction sites here in Santa Cruz and Monterey Counties!
And on a related note, Pacific Paleontology received its first contract this week to monitor a small subdivision project right here in Scotts Valley, Santa Cruz County! The site is literally right around the corner from our house and will be excavating down into the very same layer of rock that got me involved in paleontology all those decades ago as a boy roaming the hills around my home; the Santa Margarita Formation. This layer of unconsolidated sands and gravels is widespread throughout central and southern California and hosts an extremely rich and well-known Miocene (12-15mya) marine fauna. I am looking forward to pinning that first dollar bill in my prep lab very soon!
And in other related news I have been invited to the Digitization Academy with iDigBio as the Paleontological Collections Advisor for the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History. There is a big push today in natural history museums to make their collections available digitally on the web for the wider scientific community to access. My classmates come from institutions in a global community; Africa, South America, Europe, etc., who are making natural history collections available worldwide. So researchers from anywhere in the world who would like to study the fossils in our museum’s collections can login to see photos and other data on the specimens representing the evolutionary history of life in the Monterey Bay! It really is phenomenally exciting to be a part of helping to make that piece happen for our museum and our community. Super exciting!
This Megalodon jaw reconstruction here, very well-done by the way, as well as a host of other well-reconstructed extinct species discovered from the area, including this Gomphotherium, are to be found at the Museo de Naturaleza y Arqueologia de Calakmul, Calakmul, Campeche, MX. Susan and I literally stumbled upon this extremely well-done little museum in the middle of the Mayan jungle isolated from any other towns on our honeymoon ten years ago. Calakmul, a biosphere reserve now, is the name of the newly discovered ancient Mayan city that once existed here. It would have been about 7.7 square miles in area with 6,250 structures discovered so far! The base of the great pyramid covers almost 5 acres, making it the largest Mayan construction in existence and while we were there it was actively being explored by researchers! It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and you can read more here for a good general introduction to this incredible recent archeological discovery.
A peek inside at my upcoming book by the same title, volume on adds to the experience. My family and I built an amusement park named “The Lost World” in Scotts Valley, CA. My father, Larry Thompson, mother Peggy, and grandparents William and Florence Thompson, helped design and build the park around Axel Erlandson's "Tree Circus", a completely unique grove of grafted trees. In Scotts Valley, my father met Axel, originally a bean farmer from Turlock, CA, who had moved himself and his trees to the town several years before. Then in his 70's, Axel wanted to sell the trees and my dad purchased them to continue Axel’s legacy. My dad tended to the trees, making upgrades to the pathways and added a creek and waterfall, while Axel relaxed and watched the Lost World park grow up around his creations. Because the new Hwy 17 bypass skirted around Scotts Valley Dr. shortly after we purchased the trees, our main avenue of customer traffic was cut off. My dad needed a way to attract visitors back to the growing park. Being influenced by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s original film “The Lost World” (1925) he then created "Dinosaur Land", where dozens of huge life-size animatronic dinosaurs lived and could be seen from the new freeway, attracting visitors from San Jose going to the Boardwalk back around to our park. My dad died when I was 5, and only a year after opening his park, in 1965. I then grew up, until I went away to college, in Axel Erlandson's "Castle" that he built in the park (seen in the photos) amongst the incredible forest of grafted trees and families of life-sized dinosaurs. When I became old enough, I tended the trees and the dinosaurs too. Not surprisingly, I became a paleontologist and a science teacher, now recently retired from teaching and creating a paleontology business of my own: “Pacific Paleontology” here in Santa Cruz and Monterey. I have been writing a book on the history of our Lost World amusement park and Axel Erlandson’s Tree Circus and would welcome anyone sharing memories, photos, videos etc. to wthompsonctems@gmail.com or just txt to 831-535-8545.
The author in about 1977. My dog Blackie in the foreground.
Since 1977 when I was 17 I have been fascinated by the dynamic nature of our coast here along the Monterey Bay. I can never go down to the same shore twice; it’s in constant flux, never the same as it was the day before. One of the things that I have been tracking as a paleontologist here are the rockfalls that are continually happening as a coastal erosional process. These rockfalls are singularly amazing, not only in
Capitola Beach looking toward New Brighton, early 1900's and 2019.
their size and scope, but in the history of our bay that they reveal. With each new fall, like turning the pages of a book, new information comes to light and a more complete picture of the history of our bay begins to form in my mind. This process is a decadal revelation; only imaginable over long periods of time, with emergent information coming to light in the longer scale that is not visible from year to year. Not year-to-
The scale of some of these rockfalls is immense. Here is Susan for perspective.
year; but more expansive time over 10-, 20-, 30-, and 40-years that allows one to understand geological time, Deep Time, better. With each turn of the page, new and varied creatures are revealed that were not known before and more details of the ancient physical oceanography of the California coast emerges with each new strata set that comes to the light of day. Interacting with a single place over a large expanse
My dog Blackie and I taking a break from prospecting, The Point, 1980.
of time such as this can engage one in processes that are not visible in the day to day. There is a larger periodicity of non-random dynamic processes that overlies a place such as this. Some of those processes present themselves to me, others may only be inferred over even larger expanses of time, not known to a single life span. I will end with a quote from one of my favorite authors, Pulitzer Prize winning Wallace Stegner
Rockfall 10.20 is a series of interconnected and developmentally related rockfalls, 2020.
who has written some of my most comforting literature on the American west. I came to know Wallace, or rather his writing, through my father, who I did not really know at all in the sense of “father” since he past away when I was 5. From a longing to know who my father was, I was introduced to Wallace, since my father and Wallace
grew up in the same small Canadian town together, Eastend, in the early 1900’s. In reading the words of Stegner it allowed me to feel close to the father I never knew, and at the same time allowed me to learn an appreciation for a sense of place. This is a quote from one of Wallace’s last essays, the year before he died at age 84; from “The
Sense of Place” by Wallace Stegner. Copyright 1992 by Wallace Stegner. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc. “So I must believe that, at least to human perception, a place is not a place until people have been born in it, have grown up in it, lived in it, known it, died in it – have both experienced and shaped it, as individuals, families, neighborhoods, and communities, over more than one generation. Some are born in their place, some find it, some realize after long searching that the place they left is the one they have been searching for. But whatever their relation to it, it is made a place only by slow accrual, like a coral reef.” I hope you all have a strong sense of place, wherever that may be, however diversified, however tangible or conceptual. In this particular place on Earth I am comforted, because it recalls the work of Wallace Stegner, who in turn certainly knew my father, and by such circuitous routes I, too, can know my father.
Here is Olivella's Graveyard (now referred to the genus Callianax) at Pandora's Cave, New Brighton State Beach; the first shell bed unconformably overlying the finer sandstone layer immediately below it. One can see here bivalves such as Leukoma and Macoma, a naticid, perhaps Natica clausa, and the Nassariids Demondia californicus and Nassarius. Portions of this shell layer, which does not stretch continuously for the entire length of the section and is thus more aptly referred to as a Lag or Shell Bed or Lens, consists partly of concreted shell blobs and loosely concentrated shells in which the gastropods are preserved mostly whole and the bivalves are predominantly broken prior to burial. Olivella's Graveyard represents a moderately shallow water (27-46m) storm deposit and is one of many dozens of examples of "missing time", or unconformities, in the evolutionary record of our Monterey Bay where once-existing layers have been eroded away by storms during the Pliocene Period about 3 million years ago, never to be seen again.
I am happy to share that I’m adding a new position as Paleontology Collections Advisor at the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History to my schedule! I officially began my career as a paleontologist with the museum 46 years ago now, in 1976 when I was 16. It brings me unparalleled joy to now be working with the museum once again, completing my life's circle with the original institution that I began with all those years ago. https://www.santacruzmuseum.org/
The *last* stage of fossil preparation typically ends with extracting it from the block of rock that it was removed with, shown here with a 4-5 million year old clam
This is WT744, the *upper jaw*, or palatoquadrate, from the skull of a 2-3 million year old skate, related to stingrays, from the ancient Monterey Bay. Its scientific name is Raja sp cf. R. binoculata. It was discovered in one of the now well-known and most favorite layers, or shell beds, in the upper part of the Purisima Formation of Santa Cruz, CA. The other creatures that this skate was preserved alongside of include Princess Slipper snails (Grandicrepidula princeps), Arc Clams (Anadara trilineata), Giant Barnacles (Balanus aff. B. proxinubilus), and many others, and all represent a nearshore environment for this creature. In point of fact, when Chaco and Yoshi and I are out in the water on the modern reef here we can still disturb living skates resting on the bottom; they then gently flap their flippers up into the floating kelp fronds and it’s always an exciting meeting for all of us.
The rock that it came from had what we call “rip clasts” in it: chunks of angular mudstone that were broken off, or ripped, from the layer of mudstone below it during an erosional event, or regression, representing a period where there was a lowering of sea level. We have now mapped several dozen of these erosional events, called unconformities, preserved in our study area. All together they represent the dynamic geological history of our bay, itself mirroring the dynamic changes happening Globally over deep time and thus influencing and creating a dynamic biological evolutionary history as a result.
This upper jaw is not actually bone, but rather the cartilage precursor of bone found in all sharks, skates, and rays. Being soft rather than hard like bone, cartilage is less likely to be preserved in the fossil record and more rare. In fact, body cartilage of sharks, skates, and rays is even rarer and not found here at all as far as I know; presumably because mouth cartilage had to be slightly more calcified and hard structurally to do its job, and thus preserved more commonly. You will notice in the beginning of the video the hexagonal pattern of the fossilized jaw tissue that is a key feature of fossilized cartilage.
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