![]() ![]() There are also taxonomic distinctions to do with skulls and hip structure. So a Mesozoic creature swimming through the modern-day bay’s waters or flying overhead wouldn’t qualify. Hilton authored the 3.4-pound "Dinosaurs and Other Mesozoic Reptiles of California," and is careful to say that many of the superb beasts above what’s now San Francisco were not exactly dinosaurs per se.ĭinosaurs, he explains, are terrestrial - land dwelling. Northeast of Sacramento, in Rocklin, Dick Hilton is co-chair of the Sierra College Natural History Museum. Because of the state’s jumbled geology, what’s found instead are mostly fragments. Our Aquatic Beasts Dick Hilton, co-chair of the Sierra College Natural History Museum, says fully intact skeletons from the time of the dinosaurs are rare in California. A few larger spiral shells from extinct mollusks have also turned up these belonged to ammonites, which swam through the water kind of like the modern-day nautilus.īut to find evidence of the predators that ate those ammonites, you have to look closer to the prehistoric shoreline to the east. In the Marin Headlands, you can find reddish chert made up of tiny prehistoric shells of radiolarians - think of plankton. Doris Sloan, a retired geologist seen here holding a sample of serpentinite at her home in Berkeley, says during the time of the dinosaurs, the Bay Area was thousands of feet underwater. So you won't find many fossils in the Bay Area - though a few have survived. “This would shake a skeleton apart, and the sediments being dragged down into a zone where heat and pressure would metamorphose them-all of this argues you wouldn’t get much preserved,” Sloan says. NPR One or your favorite podcast platform. This, along with frequent earthquakes and underwater landslides, meant bad news for ancient bones we’d like to find today.īay Curious is a podcast that answers your questions about the Bay Area. Over millions of years, the Farallon Plate subducted into an underwater trench, melting under the continent. The California coastline was 100 miles farther east, toward the Sierra Foothills, putting the Bay Area thousands of feet underwater. And much of our ancient seafloor is long gone. ![]()
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