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Too busy to go places? Can't get out right now? Then I shall be your eyes



"It's a free country. Everybody is entitled to my own opinion."- Stephen Colbert

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It is no secret that I love fossils. I have my entire life. Ever since I first saw that woolly mammoth model in a museum in British Columbia, all I have wanted to do is work with the remains of beasts long dead. To this day, I spend many nights dreaming of traveling to some distant badland, searching for bones of camels, three-toed horses, mastodons, and mighty reptiles known as dinosaurs. It’s all I ever wanted to do.

Living where I am, it wasn’t easy to exercise that passion. There are some splendid museums here in California, but nothing like the grand exhibitions back east. But they were all far away, so visits were limited. There were not any local exposures I could probe for fossils. We didn’t live in the eroding badlands of Montana or Utah, nor had any family who did. So my love of fossils was left to mellow in limbo for many years. And so it still does.

With all the stuff I have found on the internet, and the new places I went, that passion now feels like it burns. It yearns to be let out, allowed to be able to work. It got a taste of what it was like to be free when I worked in that mammoth lab at the Santa Barbara Museum last year. God, has it been that long? But alas, it was temporary. Once again I was relegated to the sidelines, able only to read about the new finds being made by fossil hunters and traveling to museums to stare at bones in their cases. Such is the way it has been. Likely the way it’s going to be for a long time.

Why do I have such a love for the dusty old bones of dead monsters? There is just something about them. They represent what was once a living animal that lived in a very different world than ours. Sometimes, it was not so different; a link to a world that was richly exotic and yet strangely familiar. And often I find myself entranced by the remains themselves. I find myself lost in the contours of the remains, following them along their form. I get lost in the texture of the bone; is it rough or smooth? Often the matrix around the bone can add beauty to it, whether it be rough sandstone or cracking mudstone, or ordinary dirt. They are nature’s works of art.

I am doing what I can to try and reach that goal, of working with fossils. I am struggling to get through community college in the hopes of transferring to a university. I hope that if I can survive it, I just might be able to spend my days in a museum chipping away rock from fossils I found out in the field. That’s the dream. Well, a watered down version of a bigger one.

I am currently working on who owns a piece of land out in Avila Beach. I am doing so because on that piece of property lies what could be the skeleton of a 3.5 million year old giant sea cow, just like this one. But I won’t know because I can’t dig without permission. Not that I could anyway. The bones are locked away in a crumbly sandstone cliff that would require a team of excavators led by a skilled paleontologist to dig out. But the couple institutions I contacted about digging it out never responded. So it lies there, slowly eroding to dust. With this year predicted to be a wet, El Nino year, who knows how long it’ll survive. That is, if it’s even followed up on at all…

Over the past couple years I have collected bits of information that when taken together show that the Central Coast, the land contained within San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, and Ventura Counties are full of fossils. Whether it’s the Eocene/Oligocene sediments of the Sespe formation or the rocks of the Miocene Caliente formation or the sandstone of the Pismo formation and even the odd Pleistocene fossils found throughout, fossils are by no means in short supply. Unfortunately, their story may never be told. These fossils sit in the dark corners of museum collections outside the region. Museums who have vast collections at their disposal, collected from a much, much broader area. It doesn’t feel right.

The Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History is a museum dedicated to the natural history of the Central Coast. But they don’t have that much of a fossil collection, as far as I can tell. It’s mostly pygmy mammoth bones and then Emma, the mammoth I worked on last year. They are a regional museum that doesn’t have many fossils from a region that’s apparently full of them. Since they don’t have a curator of paleontology, they don’t have anyone bringing in new fossils. I have learned through my scrimping of information that most fossils lie in the collections of Berkeley, CalTech, and Los Angeles. These are museums that hold fossils numbering in the thousands from all over North America (not so sure about Caltech though) ad even further. I wonder when it was the last time someone saw them. I grew up not knowing the story of my homeland. Long I rued not living in a place that had fossils, like Montana or Utah. I no longer do. But these fossils… their story will continue to go untold. Because no one is looking for them for the Santa Barbara Museum. Because many are ignored because they aren’t considered important. The ones that do are absorbed into the mighty collections of these institutions. At least the LA Museum is displaying the Simi Valley mastodon in their new Cenozoic hall. But I think that mastodon would look better in Santa Barbara. Every fossil has a story to tell. Most are never heard. Especially those from a region as unique as ours.

All this got me thinking. There ought to be an institution here that collects and recovers fossils along the Central Coast. A place that goes out to Avila Beach or the Cuyama Valley or Santa Paula to look for fossils from out region’s past. The institute would also collect fossils that people stumble upon, whether it’s out on a hike, a ranch, or a construction project. A place that could collect, prepare, and display those fossils. At first I thought this could be the Santa Barbara Museum. But that would be another position to pay for and they can barely keep preparation going on Emma.

And then my ambitious dream grew. What if a satellite institute were founded? Maybe even one here in San Luis Obispo? SLO is a fine city, and a museum would just add to its charm. It could be an association or even a branch of the Santa Barbara Museum. And it would collect not just on the Central Coast.

The American Museum of Natural History in New York holds the largest collection of vertebrate fossils in the country. When Eric Scott of the San Bernardino County Museum showed a picture of their Frick Collection, he called the place “Mecca”. It was only when I was reading a book at Live Oak that I pieced together why they had such a collection. Back in the early part of the 20th century, a man named Childs Frick ventured into the American West to hunt for fossils. He amassed a collection of over 200,000 fossils. Because he was a trustee of the museum, they got all his stuff. He scoured the badlands of America for the remains of prehistoric mammals, providing the first comprehensive look at the North American Cenozoic. Hell, they excavated over 20 quarries in Barstow alone, granting them the largest collection from the locality to date. And Mr. Frick collected all over Nebraska, South Dakota, and beyond to discover the remains of the animals who inherited this world from the dinosaurs.

I have always loved paleontology, but it is in the last 5 years that I gained a great fascination with fossil mammals. They had taken a backseat in my mind to dinosaurs, much like the rest of the world. But then I learned more and more about them and discovered they were every bit as wonderful and fascinating. But as I just said, they always had to take a backseat. The only place I can think of where mammals are on par with dinos in the exhibit department are the American Museum and the Smithsonian. But in most other places, dinosaurs reign supreme. The LA Museum is renovating their exhibits, with their Cenozoic hall to open next year and then dinosaurs in 2011. Mammals get a larger gallery then they used to, and dinosaurs get two. See what I mean? Back in the early to mid 19th century, museums in Europe couldn’t get enough of prehistoric mammals. Their gilded halls hosted the skeletons of enormous mammoths, giant sloths, and armored glyptodonts. In fact, a good skeleton of Megatherium could cost a museum several years budget. But it was worth it, considering the crowds it would draw. But the reign of the mammals would not last. To the public, bigger is better. Dinosaurs started to turn up, in ever increasingly strange forms. And then the American West started producing complete sauropods. And so the mammals were stuffed into the corner, forever living in the shadow of the “terrible lizards”. And it’s a shame too. The LA museum has some fantastic mammal fossils in their collections, but not very many will be displayed. They don’t have the space, but that’s understandable as there is never room to display all that’s in a collection. But the could have tried to make more room. But they didn’t. They want to make the museum a dinosaur hub for the west coast. And hence, no one may ever see or even know what Gomphotaria (a totally bizarre walrus) or Caprocamelis (a goat camel) are.

I wish to follow in the footsteps of Frick. My institution would search the badlands of the American West for the extinct forerunners of our modern fauna. I am sure many museums go abroad to collect mammals, but you don’t here about it much. The institution I dream of would house great halls of not just terrestrial mammals but marine ones as well. Some many of the major museums have marine mammals, but they are intermingled with the others. And marine reptiles from the Mesozoic usually get their own halls. My institution would have a hall just for marine mammals. There would be room for dinosaurs and other critters too, but mammals would be the main focus. I mean, I do have some interest in dinosaurs, but I feel mammals should get more time in the spotlight. But then again, dinosaurs could use better representation over here.

See, the east is filled with magnificent museums: The American in New York, Smithsonian in D.C., the Field Museum in Chicago, Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, Carnegie Museum in Pittsburg, Peabody Museum at Yale and Burpee should be counted among them in the future at the rate they are going… So many museums that have marvelous collections of fossils from the west. Now there are some fantastic museums here that have great displays of local stuff, but really the only thing that can compare is Los Angeles and maybe the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco (but as far as displays go, it’s really just LA). I want to create another great outlet for fossils out here. All the local stuff we find would be displayed in Santa Barbara while our farther reaching material is displayed at the center in SLO. While dinosaurs wouldn’t be the main focus, they would have representation, and that would mean my institution could be another place to see dinosaur on the west coast. At least, that’s the dream.

Something like this would be no easy undertaking. The most important hurdle is funding. Non-profits like museums are feeling the economic crunch, and even before they did money was always an issue. The Ray Alf Museum has to start it’s renovation in January 2011 instead of 2010 because of hiccups in it’s funding. I mean, it’s not like I can look for stuff and then rent a space to get it started. That’s mainly because I don’t even have a job. Most places start out small like this through the efforts of individuals who went that extra mile. So why haven’t I started such a process? Why haven’t I sowed the seeds of what could be the next great fossil museum?

I don’t know how. I mean, I know what to do with a fossil when you find it and when you get it back to the lab. But not where to find them. The internet hasn’t been much use to me in where to look for fossils. Because in this day and age, every piece of land belongs to someone, and often property lines can be complex and even confusing. And finding permission to do so is even more challenging. I mean, it has taken me a year to get where I am with the sea cow and it still looks like a long road. And then there’s the issue of field data. I want to maintain the scientific integrity of each fossil, because that is where the real scientific value of a fossil lies. Now, I could learn how to use a GPS to mark the coordinates of each fossil, but I am stunted in that I don’t know how to record stratigraphic position. I would need geologic maps. Again, I don’t know where to get those. I have an idea of where major formations lie, but that can only get me so far. I honestly don’t know how those stupid private and commercial collectors find this stuff out.

Believe me, if I had the means, I would be out there right now, giving those fossils a good home…

The little faggot with the earring and the makeup
Yeah buddy, that's his own hair
That little faggot got his own jet airplane
That little faggot he's a millionaire

- Dire Straights, "Money for Nothing"