A father and son working on their irrigation system at a Riverside home found bones from an animal that scientists believe are about 12,000 years old.
Gary Braithwaite, 65, was showing his son how to locate sprinklers in the yard of the home, located in the Casa Blanca area of Riverside. They thought they had found metal beneath the surface, but once they dug about 4 feet down, they found the bones and had a UC Riverside paleontologist check them out.
Via Press Enterprise:
Jess Miller-Camp, a museum scientist at UC Riverside who specializes in vertebrate paleontology, initially said she thought it might be a bobcat. After checking with a colleague, she said it was more likely that the animal is a dog or a coyote.
Because of the soil conditions, she said, she thinks it very likely could be from the Pleistocene epoch, which ended with the most recent ice age, about 12,000 years ago. She plans to gather some students in the coming weeks to help unearth the bones and determine what they are.
It will be interesting to see what the scientists say once they have a chance to fully examine the bones. Hopefully, they find this is indeed a little history discovered in the I.E. and not just some sort of weird Hollywood promo for the next Ice Age movie.
