Sharktooth Hill Not A Killing Ground

Galvasean

Oh well, it was a fun notion of giant sharks and octopods battling it out in a massed brawl...

In the famed Sharktooth Hill Bone Bed near Bakersfield, Calif., shark teeth as big as a hand and weighing a pound each, intermixed with copious bones from extinct seals and whales, seem to tell of a 15-million-year-old killing ground.

Yet, new research by a team of palaeontologists from the University of California, Berkeley, the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, and the University of Utah paints a less catastrophic picture. Instead of a sudden die-off, the researchers say that the bone bed is a 700,000-year record of normal life and death, kept free of sediment by unusual climatic conditions between 15 million and 16 million years ago

Full article here.