Ocean fossils that are millions of years old, found under US school

Wayne Bischoff

When running around on your school playground, do you ever think about what life may have been like at that exact spot, millions of years ago?

Well for one high school in America, they only had to do a bit of digging to find out.

Researchers in California found two sites at a high school in Los Angeles with millions of ancient fossils.

These were some of the shark teeth that were found

They were all bones and shells of animals found either in the sea or living near it, 9 million years ago.

They included a sabre-toothed salmon, the rib bone of an extinct species of dolphin, and parts of a megalodon, which was a gigantic prehistoric shark - three times longer than the biggest great white discovered in modern times.

Students have gone through the findings to help the researchers

Students at the school helped sort the shells and bones with the researchers, and will be involved in further projects such as making murals and displays about them.

The discoveries were made between June 2022 and July 2024, and lots of the fossils have been saved from the sites for future research.

The school in San Pedro where the discovery was made

What do these findings mean for the area?

Wayne Bischoff is the director of cultural resources at Envicom Corporation.

Envicom were contracted by the Los Angeles United School District to monitor and advise on the dig.

Dr Bischoff said: “It’s the entire ecosystem from an age that’s gone … We have all this evidence to help future researchers put together what an entire ecology looked like nine million years ago. That’s really rare.”

He told BBC Newsround that the discovery shows the area was very different 8.7 million years ago.

"The fossil discovery is changing how a lot of people think about California geology," he said.

Wayne Bischoff helped uncover the fossils

Today, the area of California is all land, but researchers believe that an island was located west of where the school sits now, that doesn't exist anymore.

The reason all the fossils were preserved there was due to a volcano that erupted in the area 9 million years ago.

Mr Bischoff told Newsround: "The volcanic ash did have a lot of rare elements, such as iron, sulfur, and manganese, which coated and protected some of the fossil material."