Fossils on display at museum
FREMONT — Ice Age fossils found during a pipeline retrofit project in Fremont are part of a new public display at the Children’s Natural History Museum.
Officials from the museum, operated by the nonprofit Math Science Nucleus and the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, recently unveiled the exhibit.
It features a selection of approximately 50 fossils, some up to 12,000 years old.
The fossils were discovered when the Public Utilities Commission was excavating dirt for a seismic upgrade to two large water transmission lines that cross the Hayward Fault near Interstate 680 and Mission Boulevard. The commission donated the fossils to the museum in October 2015.
“The combination of fossils found in Fremont are equivalent to the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles’ Hancock Park,” said Joyce Blueford, a geologist and board president of the Math Science Nucleus. It’s the first bona fide find of Rancholabrean-era fossils in the Bay Area, she added. “It’s our natural history.”
The Rancholabrean fossils belonged to a stag elk and a small mouse. Fossils found from others eras included those of a horse, camel, mammoth, dire wolf and deer, according to Blueford.
The museum also houses fossils from a previous geologic era found in Irvington during the 1940s and 1950s. The discovery by a group of local boys, referred to as “the boy paleontologists” by Life magazine in 1944, led to the creation of an era known as the Irvingtonian. Those fossils were of mammoths, saber-toothed cats, mastodons, wolves and giant sloths.
The Children’s Natural History Museum, 4074 Eggers Drive, is open from 2 to 5 p.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays. Cost of admission is $3 per person ages 3 and up. Children 2 and under are free.