Searching for sharks in the dry hills of Bakersfield
By ToppStories
Sixteen thousand millennia before Col. Thomas Baker settled on a patch of dirt that would come to be known as Baker’s Field, a great ocean bay covered the land.
The primeval sea teemed with life.
And death.
Evidence of that life still exists in the skeletons of whales, the bones of long-extinct sea lions and the fearsome teeth of the 50-foot shark known as carcharodon megalodon, or giant tooth.
The Greyhound bus-sized shark may have been the most fearsome hunter to ever live on planet Earth.
On Friday, Saturday and Sunday, the ancient bone bed adjacent to Shark Tooth Hill near Bakersfield will be opened to amateur paleontologists for a rare dig. The area is famous for its rich concentration of marine fossils deposited 14 million to 16 million years ago during the Miocene era.
Organized by the Buena Vista Museum of Natural History, the event will help fund the museum and its educational programs.
All attendees must be museum members. Cost of membership is $25 per person, $20 for seniors and $75 for families.
Cost of the dig is $85 for a one-day pass with multiple-day reservations also available.
And get this: Diggers will be allowed to keep all teeth (including megalodon teeth!) and fossils with the exception of rare scientifically significant assemblages or articulated fossils.
For details go to Sharktoothhill.org or call the museum at 324-6350.
And if you go, watch out for the sharks.
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