Red Line Dig Reveals Trove of Fish Fossils

It was a plentiful fishery, once starting at Wilshire Boulevard near MacArthur Park, stretching up Vermont Avenue, over Cahuenga Pass and into the San Fernando Valley.

It has yielded more than 2,200 fish.

But none of them are good eating, since many have had more than 8 million years to age to a fossilized state.

These fossils, all excavated during the Red Line subway construction, represent 64 extinct fish species, and 39 of them are new discoveries.

There’s even evidence of an ancient flood at Universal City, just a stone’s throw from the studios famous for re-creating disasters of biblical proportion.

“Most fish fossil beds, you find a handful of species at one site,” paleontologist Bruce Lander said. “I’ve never seen this [diversity] of fish fauna in Southern California.”

Details of this rich bounty are described in a report by paleontologists hired by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

The report contains photos and data about large-mammal fossils, including a tusk fragment from a mammoth, and bones and teeth of ancient bison and sloths.

But it’s the fish that really steal the show, scientists say.

Although the subway excavation was not in sedimentary layers old enough and of the right provenance to harbor dinosaurs, paleontologists said, the fish fossils will bear much scientific fruit.

In most fish fossil beds, just a handful of species are found, said David Whistler, a curator in vertebrate paleontology at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History. But when the MTA was digging its Red Line subway station at Wilshire Boulevard and Vermont Avenue, paleontologists tapped into a veritable fishery of exciting finds.

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As cars and buses rumbled overhead, paleontologists like Lander and Whistler were hunkered 110 feet below. There, they cracked open rocks in the hope of netting fish whose images were preserved about 7 million to 8.5 million years ago.

Their catch, they say, was extraordinary.

Entombed in strata of sandstone, shale and other rock layers were fish--some never seen before, others that were the first fossilized remains of their kind found in North America.

Many are kin to their eerie, modern-day deep sea brethren that have “more head than body,” said Gary Takeuchi, a curatorial assistant at the county natural history museum. Others exhibit fishing-pole-like protuberances that dangle from the tops of their heads and fearsome, toothy jaws.

Today, such denizens of the deep are at home at least 4,000 feet below the surface, Takeuchi said.

But there’s more to the fossils than just fish stories.

While excavating the station at Universal City, paleontologists found evidence of an ancient flood that probably wreaked havoc in what is today the San Fernando Valley.

“We were there in mud up to our knees,” said Whistler, recalling fragments of water-soaked wood deep in the station’s foundation.

Because the log fragments, possibly poplar or cottonwood, were stacked uniformly, they seemed to have been stranded by a strong water force, Lander said.

“Not only did they get deposited,” he said, “but you could see channels that were cut through on the sides that showed water flow.”

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Today those wood fragments, which still smell strongly of sulfur, seem to hint at a flood more than 9,000 years ago.

That’s the age radiocarbon-dating techniques reveal for the wood chunks, which look more like poor-quality firewood than something from a petrified forest.

Other wood fragments, found in North Hollywood, were more than 46,000 years old.

They showed that the Valley once had a considerably cooler, wetter climate, with areas of redwood trees along with pines and incense cedars.

Since most of the fish fossils, wood fragments and even ancient pollen are now being housed or studied at universities and the natural history museum, most of the curious will only get to glimpse them at the MTA’s Web site, https://www.MTA.net. Click on Los Angeles Underground.