HIKE'S PREHISTORIC PAYOFF SKULL FOSSIL THOUGHT TO BE 3-TOED HORSE.

Byline: Peggy Hager Staff Writer

ANGELES NATIONAL FOREST - A family hike among the contorted rocks of Devils Punchbowl County Park turned up a 16 million- to 12 million-year-old fossil - probably the skull of a small three-toed prehistoric horse.

Alan Radecki, fiancee Barbara Morgan, and her daughter Rebecca Morgan, 11, were hiking off the main Punchbowl trail when Rebecca scrambled up a rock formation and Radecki followed. Sitting down, Radecki recognized an outcropping with odd markings as a fossil.

``We were out as a family hiking, and she lives to hike - it's her favorite activity. She climbed up on a rock formation and I climbed up. ... We looked down and it was sitting there, quite obvious,'' said Radecki, a technical photographer who studied and collected fossils in Texas. ``I knew it was a fossil. I didn't know what species.''

Radecki, who takes his camera everywhere, photographed the find and called the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

Xiaoming Wang, associate curator for the museum's vertebrate paleontology department, went out to investigate after seeing the photos, which show the upper nose plus a little bit of the teeth root of what may be a 3 1/2-foot-tall horse called merychippus that lived at the same time as mastodons and saber-toothed cats.

``I could see it was a valuable fossil,'' Wang said in an interview last week. ``We rely on the nature enthusiast to give us tips like this to give us fossils. A fossil like this, you don't get it everyday.''

The discovery was exciting, Radecki said.

``I grew up watching 'Nova' and PBS. ... You see this all the time, then all of a sudden you get to actually live it. It was kind of cool.''

Retrieved several weeks later by Wang and museum senior preparer Howell Thomas during a hike that required fording rain-swollen Punchbowl Creek barefoot, the fossil - still embedded in a chunk of conglomerate rock - is now at the county museum.

The museum staff will use a pneumatically powered vibrating needle to chip away the rock one grain at a time.

``These things are very fragile, and they are buried in the hard rocks,'' Wang said. ``You need to be very careful. ... You just can't hurry on it.''

Verifying the skull's species must wait until it is freed from the rock. But Wang is fairly confident that it belonged to a three-toed horse that lived during what is called the Barstowian age, because so many fossils from that period have been found around the desert town of Barstow.

Finding a fossil like the skull in the Punchbowl is unusual, Wang said. The Punchbowl consists of mostly conglomerate stone made up of pebble-size rocks and sand, all crossed by a fast-moving stream, so fossils are usually pulverized.

``The fossil condition ... like this partial skull is probably going to reveal a lot of new information about the anatomy of these kinds of horses. If it turns out to be a new species it is even more important,'' said Wang. ``Just a nice specimen like this by itself is going to be important. Because the Punchbowl is a high-energy deposit, most of the fossils or bones in the environment get flushed out and don't usually get preserved. To learn anything from that environment is therefore important.''

The skull Radecki and Rebecca found was actually being eroded out of the rock, so it would have been destroyed, county Park Ranger Jack Farley said. Rebecca found a fossil tooth 15 feet away from the skull down a sloped gravel bed.

Other fossils have turned up at the Punchbowl in the past, including a 20-foot-long area of fossilized bone fragments next to a trail a short distance from the park visitors center. Appearing as the ground erodes, the fragments and fossil teeth look like flat white pebbles.

Farley noticed the fragments nearly a year ago but initially left them alone. He recently began picking them up to preserve them from being walked on by visitors cutting off the main trail.

``People have been walking down through there, walking right on top of them,'' said Farley. ``At first I wasn't even sure if they were fossilized or not. They just looked like bone fragments. And then a bunch more got eroded out with this last rain, so you could kind of tell.''

The horse skull fossil can be viewed online at www.mojave.ca.us/punchbowl/fossil.html.

CAPTION(S):

4 photos

Photo:

(1 -- color) Museum curator Xiaoming Wang examines what is believed to be a skull fossil from a 3-toed miniature horse.

(2 -- 3 -- color -- ran in AV edition only) Above, county Park Ranger Jack Farley shows fossilized teeth found in the Devils Punchbowl. At right, he points to the area where the fossils were found. Farley said the skull fossil found by Alan Radecki would have been destroyed because it was being eroded out of the rock. ``People have been walking down through there, walking right on top of them,'' he said.

(4 -- ran in AV edition only) This photo shows what is believed to be fossilized remains of a miniature 3-toed horse's upper nose and a bit of the teeth root.

Peggy Hager/Daily News