A Los Angeles County high school is home to two huge deposits of fossils that experts are now using to see what the world was like hundreds of thousands and millions of years ago.
While constructing new buildings at San Pedro High School, researchers found two beds of fossils: a bone bed dating back 8.7 million years and a shell bed about 120,000 years old, the Los Angeles Times reports.
The fossils indicate that Los Angeles was formerly underwater and that there may have been additional portions of the Channel Islands that “would form and then dissipate,” as Wayne Bischoff, the director of cultural resources for Envicom Corp., the company that managed the excavated fossils, told the Times.
“There’s never been this type of density of fossils ever found at a site like this before in California,” Bischoff added. “It’s the largest marine bone bed found in Los Angeles and Orange counties.”
Given the proximity of the fossil beds and the fact that they were found under a high school, scientists said they hope to use what they find to educate the next generation.
Austin Hendy, assistant curator at the Natural History Museum, told the Times that there’s plenty more to discover.
“We hope that the students and the public will be able to sort of clamber over these rocks in the years to come and be inspired by what they find,” Hendy said.