Hi family and friends! Today's Ralph Family Photo Album is titled "Mastodon's In Fremont?" The first photo is of fossil excavation in 1913 at the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, and the second is of Lindy, Sandy and me on Fremont's Saber Cat Trail on July 25th. I hope that you enjoy our little trip back 1.2 million years!
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MASTODONS IN FREMONT?
H.G. Wells had his time machine, Walter Cronkite traveled back in time to interview historic figures on “You are There” and Mr Peabody and Sherman used their WABAC (way-back) machine on The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show as a convenient method to create historical cartoon episodes. If we had our own WABAC machine and could set it to travel back in time about 1.2 million years here in Fremont we would find a much different landscape without apartment complexes and Teslas but populated with ferocious sabrecats, threatening cave bears and huge mastodon’s. In 1867, a Centerville dentist Lorenzo Yates found fossil bones along Mission Creek here in Fremont’s Irvington District and determined that horses, large cats, camels and elephants had lived in the area more than a million years ago. A paleontologist from U.C. Berkeley, Rubin Stirton, visited the Yates site in 1936 and also found fossils including a new four pronged antelope species that he named Tetramerx irvingtonensis Stirton and named the new newly discovered age it represented “Irvingtonian of the early Pleistocene Epoch”.
Wesley Gordon, teacher and an avid rock collector took a group of school aged boys on a collecting trip in 1943 to the gravel pit in Irvington known to have fossils. On the first day of digging they found the lower jaw of a camelops, an ancient ancestor to the modern camel and began a fossil dig that lasted for more than 10 years. The twelve boys dubbed The Boy Paleontologists of Hayward and retrieved over 150,000 specimens on weekend trips and were featured in the December 10, 1945 issue of Life Magazine. Encouraged by the efforts of the “boys”, my interest in local paleontology began with seeking sea life fossils on the roadside of Mt. Diablo State Park and later in the rich volcanic landscape of Yellowstone National Park on the Yellowstone Science Expedition led by Wally Hennessy. Unfortunately the Irvington fossil site, refuted to be as rich with specimens as Southern California’s La Brea Tar Pits, was covered up in 1959 by the construction of the 680 freeway through Fremont. Fossil specimens of dozens mammal species from the Irvington gravel pit can be found at the University of California, Ohlone College, The Fremont History Museum and at the Children’s Natural History Museum. A walk along the Sabrecat Creek Trail parallel to Mission Creek between Mission San Jose and Irvington where these creatures once roamed is like a trip in Mr. Peabody’s WABAC machine. And it’s not that difficult to visualize large sabertooth cats stalking giant sloths in the underbrush while hairy mastodons lumber along Mission Blvd. -Bill Ralph 8/8/20
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