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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