SLO County hills hid fossil treasures from a tropical era millions of years ago
Maybe Templeton High School’s mascot should be a crocodile or rhino, not an eagle.
Maggie White wrote this article that explains the deep history hidden in the hills of the area on Oct. 25, 1994.
Cow trails cover ancient paths of bigger critters
TEMPLETON — Imagine Templeton as a tropical seaside paradise overgrown with lush greenery and lined with white beaches along warm waters filled with colorful fish.
It’s tough to picture this dusty inland ranching town as a thriving shoreline, but 200 million years ago it was. Rex Saint’Onge doesn’t just believe that — he’s helping to prove it.
Saint’Onge is a field associate in vertebrate paleontology — a fancy name for someone who looks for animal fossils — for the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.
“I always wanted to be in search of the truth about the Earth’s history,” says the San Miguel resident. “I don’t want people to tell me what to think.”
The volunteer researcher doesn’t have to travel to exotic locations to do his digging for the museum. He can take his picks and brushes and head out to the hills near Adelaide, the dry creekbeds behind his house or the innocuous-looking mounds in Templeton.
What he’s finding are clues to what the Central Coast was like more than 20 million years ago. It was a place none of us would even recognize, says Saint’Onge.
At different periods between 10 million and 23 million years ago — the age of many of the fossils Saint’Onge is discovering — sea water covered much of North America.
As the water receded, 75-foot-long whale-eating sharks ruled the local oceans. Mastodons, camels and rhinos roamed where we walk today.
Palm trees were abundant, beavers were the size of bears and hippo-like mammals munched on seaweed and shellfish.
“It’s kind of romantic to think of that kind of stuff going on here,” Saint’Onge says.
“You go to work every day and you don’t think about what the Earth’s history is, but you’re walking on it.”
Saint’Onge searches for fossils — which include bones, teeth, shells and impressions in rock — at hundreds of locations in the county.
Some of his most important finds have come out of sites near Templeton, where he was spending a morning digging last week.
While most people would pass by the cream-colored hill near town without a second glance, Saint’Onge knows what he’s looking for.
With a couple of hammer-sized picks, a knife, some small boxes and tubes for his finds and a sifting screen to separate the fossilized treasures from the sand, Saint’Onge can usually find a handful of history.
In about half an hour at the site last week, the researcher found a nearly whole mako shark tooth, two smaller shiny black shark teeth, three fish molars and two teeth form a tiny tropical fish known as a surgeon fish. Though the large shark tooth looked the most impressive, it was the least interesting to Saint’Onge — he finds dozens of them. It was the surgeon fish teeth — as tiny as sesame seeds — that were the most important, he said.
The tropical teeth are more proof that Templeton was a pre-historic Hawaii.
What is also important about the Templeton site is that Saint’Onge is finding fossils from both water and land animals. That means the sandstone mound was once a beach, lagoon or marshy area where the land met the water, he says.
Sites like those are rare.
“We never know what we’re going to find,” he says. “That’s the neat thing about this site — you had two different things going on.”
Saint’Onge has found hundreds of shark, dolphin, sea lion and tropical fish teeth in Templeton, as well as rhino and rodent teeth. He’s also turned up a 4-inch tooth from a 75-foot shark called carcharocles megaladon.
The Templeton hillside has also produced the county’s first — and so far only — pre-historic crocodile tooth, one of Saint’Onge’s key discoveries. Until he found the tooth three months ago, researchers had no record that crocodiles — which have remained almost unchanged for millions of years — existed in this area.
But the researcher’s biggest find is a previously undiscovered bird that may be named after him, the Saint Ongii.
In the hills between Paso Robles and Cambria, Saint’Onge found an almost complete, detailed fossil impression in the shale. It was of a new species of a diving bird similar to a gull or shearwater.
Because birds’ bones are hollow and the feathers decompose, their fossils are extremely hard to come by, the researcher says. This is the first record that the bird existed.
Saint’Onge’s other finds include fist-sized mastodon molars in San Miguel, whale skulls all over the county, camel bones in Dry Creek in Paso Robles and molars and tusks from desmostylians, an extinct animal similar to a hippo or walrus, in Coalinga.
Teeth are the most common finds because they are harder than marrow-filled bone, allowing them to fossilize more easily.
“I’m adding to the fossil record of North America,” he says.
Saint’Onge specializes in the Miocene time period — about 23 million to 10 million years ago. In contrast, dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago and man showed up about 5 million years ago.
He’s been with the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County as a field researcher since 1988. “After a couple of hundred finds I guess they decided to give me a chance,” he said.
Saint’Onge sends all of his finds to the museum for official identification, aging and cataloging.
Though Saint’Onge keeps his sites secret so they aren’t picked clean or overrun, he will take an interested amateurs on digs with him to show what to look for.
“Most people throw away 80 to 90 percent of what they’re looking for” because the fossils are so small or indistinguishable, he said.
It is illegal to collect items from private property without a permit or permission.
Saint’Onge has been interested in the pre-historic since his first-grade class took a field trip to the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History. “I saw the dinosaurs and I was hooked,” he said.
“It’s the idea that all these things lived on this earth that amazes me,” he said. “Fossils are like pages in a history book — it’s a different way of looking at the world.
After living in Southern California for several years and learning about the miocene era there, Saint’Onge moved to San Miguel — partly because he knew this county is a virtually unresearched “bone bed.”
“Pretty much you can go everywhere and find stuff,” he said. Saint’Onge digs during the day and works at night and Ennis Business Forms in Paso Robles. He’s a graphic designer and former illustrator for Warner Bros. cartoon characters. He still creates T-shirt and product packaging designs for them as a freelancer.
His wife, Sherry, and children, Rex Jr. and Ashley, help him occasionally on his digs even though they don’t share his passion for paleontology.
“But I just cant think of anything else I’d rather be doing.”
