Photo courtesy of www.alchetron.com
A Desmostylus was a hippo-like creature that lived about 20 million years ago. It happens to be the only order of marine mammal to have gone extinct. Some individuals lived along the shoreline of an ancient ocean that used to be located where the Sunol Valley is today.
If you stumbled upon this would you know it was a rib cage? What it looked like prior to Excavation
During excavation of the Calaveras Dam Replacement Project, the project paleontologists found not only a few teeth belonging to these strange creatures, but recently found an entire rib cage. Removing the fossilized rib cage of an animal that likely weighed between 200 and 400 pounds in life is no small task.
First the bone had to be cleaned and separated as much as possible from the surrounding rock on the hillside.
Above is the picture after our fossil was cleaned and ready to be removed.
In order to physically remove it from the hillside, crews used a lift to grab the entire rib cage. Now that the rib cage has been safely removed from the construction site, it awaits further stabilization treatment by project paleontologists.
See you around the Valley!
