ROAD WORK LEADS TO FOSSIL DISCOVERY : LOWER TUSK FRAGMENT OF ANCIENT ELEPHANT FOUND NEAR HIGHWAY.

Byline: Paula Bryant Pratt The Ridgecrest Daily Independent

Some 12 million years ago, what is now the city of Bakersfield was on the coastline. The Sierra Nevada range - responsible for the rain shadow that keeps the Mojave from having the same climate as Santa Barbara - had not yet been born.

A key fossil find in the Dove Springs Formation near Red Rock Canyon State Park late last month provided scientific proof that ancient elephants called shovel-tusk gomphotheres lumbered through this once lush area more than 9.5 million years ago.

According to David Whistler, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum, ``(The find) is the proof of what we had already concluded, that the animal was actually here. It is the icing on the cake.''

The fortuitous discovery is a fossilized fragment of the lower left tusk of a mastodon-like elephant about nine feet high that used its tusks to root for forage. An upper tusk - the shovel-tusk gomphothere had four - of the same species had already been found in the area, but information from it was not conclusive, Whistler said.

The tusk fragment may have remained hidden were it not for a construction project to widen a five-mile stretch of Highway 14 from two to four lanes. According to Park Ranger Mark Faull, Caltrans officials cooperated with the park in a five-year consultation process regarding the Red Rock Canyon area's ``sensitive heritage.''

Caltrans has also considered the impact of the highway widening on archeological sites, desert tortoise burrows and Joshua tree groves. ``Highways are done differently today, and we get rewards because we do them differently,'' Faull said.

Because Caltrans was aware that the Dove Springs Formation - approximately 13 million years old - held the reputation for being one of the richest fossil beds in the state, officials asked the ranger station to help them locate any valuable areas that might be in the path of construction.

Work on two new lanes for the southbound side of the highway would have steamrolled directly over the fossilized tusk that Whistler found. Caltrans waited for two days for the fossil to be retrieved before beginning grading work on the site.

Thanks to Caltrans, Whistler was on site to discover chips from the nearby gomphothere tusk. Recognizing that the tooth dentine of a prehistoric elephant has a characteristic structure, Whistler and his associates literally crawled across the ground to scout out an 18-inch splinter of a 3-foot-long, 8-inch-wide gomphothere tusk with the shovel portion visible.

Whistler's crew gouged the earth around the dull gray fossil, which was riddled with cracks, rather than risk lifting it. On March 25, as members of the news media watched, Whistler and his assistants draped wet paper towels over the tusk to shield it from a cascade of liquid plastic cement used to preserve the specimen.

``Somebody who didn't know what they were doing could easily turn this heritage into dust by trying to take it out in an improper fashion,'' Faull commented.

``It's just like a surgeon preparing a broken bone,'' Whistler said of the casting process. After prying it out with chisels, Whistler's crew will take the hardened ``cocoon'' of plaster back to the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum, where the rock will be ground away from beneath the embedded tusk with air-driven chisels, a process that takes a couple of months.

Whistler said that this casting method was invented by pioneer paleontologists in the 1840s, who used a mix of water and the flour they brought along to make bread.

Whistler, who had guessed that portions of the fossil bed farther from the highway were richer, is pleased with the serendipity of the Caltrans road work that led to his momentous discovery. ``I probably wouldn't even have looked here were it not for the highway,'' he said.

How did the fossil end up there? According to Whistler, who has been collecting fossils in the area since the late 1950s, the shovel-tusk gomphothere, along with prehistoric versions of horses, antelopes, camels and even a ``sheep-deer,'' thrived in the valley before it ever became a desert. ``Rainfall was at least 30 inches a year, falling throughout the year,'' Whistler speculated. ``The climate was similar to Mazatlan's.''

Water was plentiful in those ancient days - a stream rushed along the canyon floor. Animal skeletons that washed into it quickly broke apart and were scattered.

``We do not get whole fossil skeletons because it was an extremely active streambed,'' Whistler said.

Red Rock Canyon is no stranger to exciting paleontological finds. Several years ago, another Highway 14 construction project uncovered parts of a 16,000-year-old bison skeleton, Whistler said.

``We're finding new things here all the time,'' Faull said. ``We're one of the best fossil beds in California. About 30 colleges in the state come to us for field trips.''

The Red Rock Canyon State Park Visitor's Center is raising funds to complete an exhibit of actual fossils and replicas open to the public. Faull said the park is shooting for a fall opening date.

If it is in good enough shape for display, the tusk fragment may be removed from storage at the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum and returned to Red Rock Canyon's planned fossil display.

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2 Photos

Photo: (1--Color only in AV edition) David Whistler of the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum views the cement-encased fossil of a tusk of the gomphothere.

(2--Color only in AV edition) A paleontologist holds a portion of the tusk discovered near Red Rock Canyon State Park.

Associated Press