Greetings family, friends and neighbors!  Todays Historic Rambling is actually a bit of local pre-history (three hundred million years!)  that I hope you find of interest.....Bill

Historic Ramblings

HORSETAILS - “LIVING FOSSILS”

The shade from the sycamores, palms and three hundred year old oaks provide little relief from the summer heat along Mission Creek while an motionless great blue heron stands in the cooling stream. It was here in Mission Valley that Lorenzo Yates discovered fossilized bones in the 1930’s, the naming of the period “Irvingtonian of the early Pleistocene Epoch’ by paleontologist Rubin Stirton took place, and The Boy Paleontologist of Hayward uncovered thousands of mammal fossils in Irvington’s Bell Quarry on Osgood Road in the 1940’s’. Sabercats, cave bears, mastodons, giant sloths and camels roamed here over a million years ago, however that’s not even close to the three hundred million year old primitive horsetail plants that can be found thriving along the banks of the creek in Gomes Park along with native watercress, flat sedge and tule. 

At one time the most dominant plant in the world, horsetails first appeared during the Jurassic period and were likely a common food for herbivorous dinosaurs. Some of the roughly thirty five species of the jointed, ribbed bright green plants reached nearly a hundred feet in height. The prolific plant, native to most everywhere except Australia and Antarctica, was a primary component in the formation of our planets coal beds. Todays hardy horsetails found in wet and swampy regions grow to just a foot or two. Known as scouring rush by the areas early pioneers, the plants dried branches were used for cleaning tin pots and mugs because of it’s unique brush shape and abrasive silicate coating.

Take a walk along Fremont’s Mission Creek or Sabercat Creek trails where great blue herons patiently seek a meal, prehistoric mammals once roamed, and where horsetails, “living fossils”, have managed to survive for three hundred million years.

-Bill 8/23