Jurassic Echo Park

You’ve got to promise not to tell anyone,” says Vic. His voice drops to a conspiratorial hush. “There’s a fossilized whalebone on Sunset Boulevard in Echo Park.” Vic, a local artist (and a fossil in his own right as the son of old-line Lefties), has visions of corporate entrepreneurs transforming his quirky neighborhood into a paleo theme park.

Sure enough, on the north side of Sunset between Coronado and Waterloo, there it is: Low cliffs glow golden in the morning light, and a distinctly vertebrae-like formation about 15 feet long catches the eye. Could Echo Park become “Dinoland”?

No chance, says Dr. Lawrence Barnes, the friendly curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum. The spiny configuration isn’t a fossil at all, he says, but a geological formation (a “concretion,” to be exact) apparently created when water flowed through the 10- to 12-million-year-old marine sandstone that rises along that stretch of Sunset. In fact, Barnes says, the marine sandstone extends from beyond Mt. Washington all the way to Lincoln Heights. “My first year on the job back in 1972, I got calls about that formation, and I still get two to three calls a year from people who think they’ve made a new discovery,” he says.

But take heart, amateur paleontologists. According to Dr. Barnes, about 75% of the museum’s new discoveries are initiated by an enthusiastic public, many of whom become museum volunteers. A complete and beautifully preserved baby sea turtle from the Middle Miocene epoch 14 to 15 million years ago was found on the Palos Verdes Peninsula. And, of course, the Eastside has yielded a baleen whale, Mixocetus elysius, found in 1931 in Lincoln Heights by a laborer while digging irrigation trenches for an avocado orchard.

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For information on volunteering, call the volunteer resource office at the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum, (213) 763-3531.