Fossil field trips to 4 locations in California, Fall 2021

Join us for Paleontological excursions in 4 different places where you can observe fossils in California. Whale bones, petrified wood, clams, sea urchins and crab imprints.
*****Protected places are great because you can revisit them many times and the fossils are still there. Although, in case of this beach, you can usually find many new fossils because the ocean constantly mixes up the gravel, rotating and smoothing rocks to reveal fossils you would not notice during previous trips. Important! Everything you find should remain on the beach. With that said, let’s take a look at this large rock containing a series of vertebrae, likely small whale bones.
When a while dies and sinks to the bottom of the ocean, it attracts various animals that feast on the carcass. It seems like these elongated structures are the burrowing of worms.

We found plenty of other fossils of course. This one is interesting. It seems like a large clam that was covered with barnacles. The shell eroded completely, leaving only imprint, but the white, round outlines of the barnacles still remain. This rock has fossilized (likely mammalian) teeth in the hard matrix. Cool! Here is another fascinating find. Could it be a set of bones from a whale fin? Few phalanges similar to those we have in our hands.

Next place to check is a creek that runs along the Petrified Forest road near Calistoga. There are few videos on Youtube describing the place. So, we went there but did not find much. The place was definitely cleaned thoroughly, at least in the areas we searched. The petrified wood is mostly white here and should be easy to spot. We found only a single piece resembling petrified wood and that’s it. When you spend half a day in the creek, slip on wet clay couple times, get your feet wet and come home with piece like this, you understand that people who cut and polish petrified wood into smooth and shiny pieces and make them available for purchase do a big favor to the public, bringing the beauty of these fossils for us to enjoy.

Moving on to huge the bluffs of Mussel Rock Beach near Daly City south of San Francisco. The marine deposits of the Late Pliocene to Early Pleistocene age are massive here and, if you look carefully, you can find plenty of fossils. It’s mostly large clams, occasional clusters of sand dollars or sea urchins. The preservation is terrible. The shells are quite fragile. But they are there and you can enjoy finding them anytime you wish because not many people really want to take them home. Just be careful, the cliffs are unstable and erosion is constant.

The bluffs beach located right on the San Andreas fault. Visitors can easily notice remnants of huge landslide caused by tectonic movements. The bluffs consist of sandstones, siltstones and claystones belonging to Merced formation. The thickness of the formation is astonishing 1 mile thanks to constant accumulation of the sediment for 2-3 million years. If you know where to look, you can spot few ash beds that bear the ash of an ancient volcano, mount Tehana located in nowadays Lassen Volcanic National Park.

Another cool feature of this place is that just around the Mussel Rock, it is possible to see how the boundaries between the ocean waters and Bay waters. This is where a bit more muddy but less salty water from the Bay mixes with clear ocean water. You have to be near the parking lot to see it from the above. The weather, tides and seasons are likely to affect your chances to observe such a phenomenon as outflow of freshwater from San Francisco Bay.

Finally, here are few new finds from our favorite locality in Carmel valley near Monterey. In addition to usual crab imprints, we found few fragments of fish that day. Somebody did a bit of digging here and let me tell you that we are strongly against any digs. Too much effort with little result. We find it more responsible AND productive to carefully browse through the naturally eroded rocks to spot the irregularities on their surface – little rusty spots where iron oxide accumulated in the spaces formed around the dead organisms adding a brown color to imprints. Well that’s it for today. Hit the like button if you learn something new and see you next time. Cheers!

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