California man unearths a million fossils

By John Johnson
Los Angeles Times

BRYAN CHAN / LOS ANGELES TIMES Bob Ernst digs at the fossilized skull of a whale on his acreage near Bakersfield, Calif.

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The swath of landscape a dozen miles northeast of Bakersfield doesn't have much to recommend it. There's no water, no shade. This place is special because of what's under it, not what's on it.

This is Ernst's personal fossil farm. The former furniture salesman estimates that he's pulled more than 1 million fossils from this hard, brown earth over three decades.

His discoveries are in several museums. Without his contributions, the Buena Vista Museum of Natural History in downtown Bakersfield would not exist, said Ken Gobalet, a professor at California State University, Bakersfield, and a member of the museum's board.

"There's just something about knowing you are the first human being to touch that bone," Ernst said, explaining his passion.

If it seems unlikely that one man, even one digging virtually every day, as Ernst says he does, could unearth 1 million bones, others tend to believe him for a simple reason. Ernst's property is part of a unique formation called the Round Mountain Silt that also includes Sharktooth Hill, which some scientists consider as important as the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles and the Dinosaur National Monument that straddles the Utah-Colorado state line.

The area is "the biggest assemblage of bones" ever found from the Miocene period, said Larry Barnes, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History. The Miocene Epoch was about 15 million years ago. The last dinosaur had died more than 50 million years earlier. Mammals were taking over, including mastodons, camels, rhinos and a giant animal with a massive body and a dog's face, called a "bear-dog."

"In some areas, the bones are stacked virtually on top of one another," said Tom Demere, a paleontologist at the San Diego Natural History Museum.

Some amateurs have offered their finds for sale on Web sites or at big auction houses. The skull of a diplodocus, a long-necked, plant-eating dinosaur that grew to 90 feet in length, was advertised on a Web site recently for $150,000.

The skeleton of an allosaurus, a dinosaur predator that stood 16 feet tall, was sold to a Japanese collector for $400,000. That skeleton had been illegally dug up on federal land, an example of a growing problem that has prompted efforts to protect fossil beds on public lands.

The National Park Service has reported 721 incidents of fossil theft or vandalism over the past three years, and there's a move afoot in Congress to crack down on commercial fossil hunters.
 
Ernst presents a different issue. He owns some of the most valuable digging grounds in the region, and he limits who can join him, partly for fear of lawsuits after one visitor contracted valley fever.

Some have criticized him for selling his finds, most notably the skeleton of an ancient sea creature to the Japanese, violating an unwritten law against sending valuable artifacts out of the country. Others praise him for bringing attention to a resource that most in the Central Valley do not even know exists.

Ernst first visited Sharktooth Hill in the late 1960s, when the area was owned by Getty Oil. "People were all over the hill, digging," he said. It was the height of Polynesian-chic, when hip young men didn't feel complete without a shark-tooth necklace. The first day, Ernst found a 5-inch tooth from a megalodon, a giant ancestor of the great white shark.

"That tied the knot," Ernst said.

He bought his first land — 80 acres — nearly 30 years ago. It cost $18,000. Today, he owns 420 acres of prime fossil-hunting territory. He won't divulge how much he paid, saying only that he sold inherited land elsewhere. Each year, he said, groups of scientists from around the world visit his property. "They stand in awe," he said.

Today, Ernst allows only supervised groups on his property. Each visitor must sign a waiver and go through special training.

"I like to think about what happened out here 15 million years ago," he said on a recent afternoon as he drove his pickup to one of his digs. Partially exposed was the fossilized skull of a whale.

The whale lived in a vastly different Southern California. The Miocene Epoch was a warm period in geologic history. Grasslands were widespread, and an inland sea lapped against small hills that later would push up into the Sierra Nevada.

The river delta was dominated by large mammals. But what would make the place special to scientists millions of years later was its rich sea life. More than 125 species have been found, according to Barnes.

Whales and sea lions, 11 kinds of dolphins and 15 kinds of sharks have been unearthed. Several species were named on the basis of bones from Sharktooth Hill. Ernst uncovered a previously unknown type of sea lion, which he said Barnes plans to name after him.

How the creatures came to be there, and in such numbers, has been a matter of conjecture for a century or more, since a railroad surveyor stumbled on the spot and noticed all the shark teeth. One popular theory is that the animals were trapped and slowly died out when the land around the inland sea heaved upward, isolating it.

Although 500-foot Sharktooth Hill gave its name to the fossil beds, it now is known that the beds extend well beyond the small hill, an estimated 110 square miles.

Barnes' attachment to Sharktooth Hill is as deep, if not deeper, than Ernst's. Barnes, 58, at age 8 dragged his father to the fossil beds. Today, the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History has 400,000 specimens from Sharktooth Hill.

Barnes wrote a field study that helped persuade the government to make the Sharktooth Hill portion of the fossil bed a national natural landmark.

Bill Coleman, a North Carolina fossil hunter who sells megalodon teeth online for as much as $28,000 each, said he understood the resentment paleontologists have for commercial collectors. Some "look at it as a means to buy a six-pack of beer," he said.

But most are not like that, Coleman said. Ernst counts himself among the responsible hobbyists. He sells shark teeth, he says, but only to support his research and the Bakersfield museum.