Cretaceous Park

Duckbill dinosaur neck bones. Mammoths’ tusks. Fanged oreodont skulls. Bear bones, camel bones, horse bones. Mysterious walrus-like bones left by a fat creature that shook its mighty tusks and roared at the sun on the edge of the sea. Bones by the truck-full and fossils by the barrel are being uncovered as 55 million cubic yards of earth are excavated to build the Eastern Transportation Corridor between the 91 and Foothill freeways through Irvine. The project is cutting a highway through time as bulldozers and tractors rumble south toward the coast, laying bare sediments as young as the last gust of wind and as old as 80 million years.

“Projects like this one don’t come along very often,” says Mark Roeder, a paleontologist with Paleo Environmental Associates, an Altadena company that collects fossils on construction sites. “We’re seeing a lot of new species we never would have found otherwise.”

Although the more significant bones and fossils will probably end up in a museum collection, for now they are piling up in temporary huts and gray storage containers near the highway’s grading sites. The dedicated “paleomonitors” whom Roeder supervises--Ester Trivino, Phil Peck, Gino Calvano, Mauloud Ibrahim, Marian Meyer, Brett Malas and Dave Hanson--spend 10-hour days sifting through the road-building detritus, collecting the bones and fossilized remains. The project’s many unexpected finds have been cause for celebration, albeit brief. “When we find something that’s out of the ordinary, we get excited, but we have to get it out fast,” Roeder says. “You don’t want to hold up construction.”

The discoveries from the highway project are helping fill in the still-sketchy portrait of prehistoric Southern California. Fossilized logs hauled from ancient stream beds uncovered by the excavation indicate that groves of 60-foot-high avocado-like trees once swayed in the balmy afternoon breezes long before Native Americans ran through the shrubs and brush. Small whale skeletons surrounded by shark teeth suggest that parts of Irvine may have been a calving area a few million years back. The discovery of a fragment of mammal bone, along with dinosaur bones and plentiful star pine needles, suggests that northern Orange County was once a conifer forest with a few broad-leaf trees. Dinosaurs ran through the pines, sending terrified cat- and rat-sized mammals scurrying.

One can only wonder what dinosaur bones lie buried beneath the cities built on the 80-million-year-old rock of the Los Angeles Basin. But the spoils from the highway project already indicate that life in the really old days may not be what we’d envisioned. “When all the fossil analysis is done,” says Roeder, “we’ll probably discover things we never expected about the L.A. region.”