Fossils From MTA Tunnel Reveal Ancient Flood

It was a plentiful fishery, once starting at Wilshire Boulevard near MacArthur Park, stretching up Vermont Avenue, over the 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, more than half of them new discoveries.

There is 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,” said paleontologist Bruce Lander. “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 to comply with state and federal laws protecting fossil sites. Photos and data about large-mammal fossils including a tusk fragment from a mammoth, bones and teeth of ancient bison and sloth are also listed.

But it’s the fish that 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 say 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 finds.

As cars and buses rumbled overhead, paleontologists such as Whistler and Lander, the MTA project paleontologist, were hunkered down 110 feet below, cracking open rocks in the hopes of netting images of fish preserved for 7 million to 8 1/2 million years.

Entombed in layers of sandstone, shale and other rock layers were fish. In addition to those never seen before were others that were the first fossilized remains of their kind found in North America.

Many are kin to eerie, modern deep sea brethren, which have “more head than body,” or sport projections like fishing poles that dangle from the top of their heads and fearsome, toothy jaws, said Gary Takeuchi, a curatorial assistant at the county Natural History Museum.

Today those denizens of the deep are at home in 4,000-foot-deep water, or deeper, Takeuchi said.

While excavating the station at Universal City, paleontologists found that an ancient flood 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 logs deep in the station’s foundation.

Because the wood fragments, possibly poplar or cottonwood, were stacked up 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.”

Today those wood fragments, which still emit a strong sulfur aroma, seem to hint at a flood more than 9,000 years ago.

That’s how old the wood chunks, which look remarkably like bad firewood, were dated according to radiocarbon techniques.

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 visitors will get to glimpse them only at the MTA’s Web site.

That site is https://www.MTA.net: Click on Los Angeles Underground.