![]() As the team etched away at the rock encasing the bone, teeth, a skull, and two tusks belonging to the elephant-like, eight-million-year-old mastodon emerged, reports Tia Ghose for Live Science. Shapiro's team excavated the site and uncovered the tip of a pearly, white bone. ![]() Jason Halley, California State University, Chico To preserve the tusks, paleontologists coated them with a mixture of acetone and liquid plastic. The mastodon tusks spanning almost six feet, were found upside down, each one crossing each other. From there, EBMUD reached out to paleontologists and geologists from California State University, Chico, to take a closer look. After finding dozens of trees, I realized that what I was looking at was the remains of a petrified forest."Īfter three weeks of surveying and uncovering more fossilized pieces of the forest, Francek found what appeared to be vertebrate fossils, Chico State Today reports. "I looked around the area further, and I found a second tree," Francek says in a statement. Park ranger and naturalist Greg Francek from the East Bay Municipal Utility District (EBMUD) first stumbled upon a petrified forest while on patrol in the Mokelumne River Watershed, located in the Sierra Nevada, reports the Chico State Today. "Few other fossil discoveries like this exist in California," says California State University paleontologist Russell Shapiro, to Ashley Gebb for Chico State Today. ![]() Dating back to the Miocene epoch, the site is considered one of the most significant fossil discoveries in California history, reports Andrew Chamings for SFGate. In the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in California, paleontologists have uncovered a collection of fossils, including an eight-million-year-old mastodon skull with both tusks intact, a rhino skeleton, a giant tortoise, 600 petrified trees, and many more specimens.
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