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Millions of ancient fossils were discovered underneath a California high school and it’s rewriting the state’s history. Take a look.

September 20, 20240
Construction halted at San Pedro High School when fossils were discovered.

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People first uncovered fossils around San Pedro High School in 1936. They were ancient shells belonging to snails and other mollusks from tens of thousands of years ago.

That’s why Austin Hendy, an assistant curator at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, wasn’t too surprised when a similar bed of shells turned up during construction on the former site of the school’s home economics building in 2022.

The shell bed was 120,000 years old. When Hendy got a look at it, he said it was like stepping back in time.

“I could see the shoreline in three dimensions, and I could see all the fossils, all the organisms that were living on that shoreline and washing up on that beach,” he said.

The site’s shell bed now accounts for the museum’s largest collection of fossil shells.

While the shell bed was an exciting find in its own right, the scientists had no idea they had only scratched the surface of the fossil-packed site.

Far older fossils waited nearby.
This large rock contains countless fossils, including dolphin vertebrae and fish bones.

Austin Hendy/Courtesy of the Natural History Museums of Los Angeles County

The blocks contain everything from extinct dolphins to sea turtles to sharks to impressions left behind by seaweed.

That’s because roughly 9 million years ago, Southern California was underwater.

The diverse collection of different animals and plants is special, Hendy said, because it provides experts a better understanding of the California coast’s ecosystem during the Late Miocene epoch, millions of years ago.

The skull of a sandpiper bird changed everything.
Megalodon sharks were massive, and so were their teeth. Those shown here belonged to juveniles.

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The high school wasn’t done giving up its secrets. Older fossils lay even deeper beneath the bone bed.

These 8.9-million-year-old rocks included fossilized bones of fish and marine mammals. Experts also found teeth from juvenile megalodons and other smaller sharks.

Megalodons were enormous, three times longer than a great white. An adult megalodon’s teeth could grow as large as nearly 7 inches.

“The megalodon shark was the apex predator in the water,” Bischoff said.

Many other fish swam alongside these giant hunters. The bone beds also included an extinct saber-tooth salmon. The unusual-looking fish, which had large, protruding teeth, had never been found in Southern California before.

Students will help discover some of the fossils’ secrets.
Natural History Museum workers sort through fossils from the SPHS site.

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Bischoff has worked on many other sites but said, “The SPHS site is entirely unique.” That’s because of the huge amount of fossils they found there.

“The NHM team has stated that it is the largest marine bonebed ever found in Los Angeles and Orange Counties,” he said.

The work of analyzing the fossils is still in its early stages. Researchers at the museum will continue studying the fossils and hope to publish some of their findings in 2025.

The Los Angeles Unified School District and Cabrillo Aquarium plan to display their collections and use them for educational programs.

Eventually, the high school will have its own exhibit on the fossil finds. Hendy plans to have a future student intern design it.