Not your typical hike or bike adventure. More of a treasure hunt.
Dorie and I visited some good friends in Sacramento and on the way back, stopped in Bakersfield to visit Sharktooth Hill and Ernst Quarries. Here, for a fee, you can dig for shark’s teeth and fossils in a 15 million old seabed. The property sprawls over 260 acres and is comprised of three distinct quarries, two for paleontology research and one for public exploration. The large sea turtle at the San Diego Museum of Natural History is from one of the quarries.
The orientation tour took us by an excavation site where they were extracting a large whale. After the short tour, we were turned loose to dig as we wished. The barren area was hot even at 900a, but they provided all the tools and even a small umbrella at the various dig sites.
After about an hour at the first site, we found nothing but bones, and were getting very frustrated, especially when we heard squeals success from some of the other digger’s children when they discovered something. We moved to another site and on the first shovel, we found a very nice Mako Shark’s tooth. This site was very productive for us and we finished the morning there. The manager of the property visited every party (there were only 7 of us) to discuss our finds and be helpful in digging and identification. We found one bird leg-bone with a small shark’s tooth embedded. He said it was a real find, but you must look hard to see the tooth. Our large 1 1/2-inch Mako Shark tooth came from a 12 foot shark. (1 inch of tooth equals 8 feet of shark)
About 100p the heat was becoming unbearable, so we took off with our treasure for the 4 hour drive home. An enjoyable experience.
