Underwater World

When Steven Spielberg’s sequel to the 1993 blockbuster “Jurassic Park” hits movie screens today, it may well unearth dino-mania all over again.

But if little Mary gets inspired to start digging up the backyard to find remnants of Tyrannosaurus rex, hide the shovel.

You won’t find him here.

Not unless T. rex had a rowboat. Or a penchant for surfing.

The stone cold truth is that Ventura County, the San Fernando Valley and much of Southern California were thousands of feet below the sea when those Jurassic giants of movie fame roamed the earth 65 million to 200 million years ago.

“It’s not impossible that somebody could find dinosaur bones in the Santa Monica Mountains, because there are rocks of the right age and they were laid down on land,” said paleontologist John Alderson, who leads tours and teaches a course on the region’s prehistoric past through Learning Tree University. “At this point, nobody’s found any fossils of any kind.”

Dinosaur fossils, that is.

But to the delight of local fossil hounds, the primitive parents of today’s common mammal and marine species certainly left their mark.

Tectonic forces and underwater volcanoes eventually lifted Ventura County to the light of day some 42 million years ago, only to be inundated by the sea again, and then resurface about 2 million years ago.

That left the region a veritable graveyard of primitive marine and mammal fossils, from ancient crabs, snails and sand dollars to whale bones, woolly mammoths and mastodons dating back tens of millions of years.

“The history of Ventura County in terms of fossils goes back to the Cretaceous period 100 million years ago,” Alderson said.

It may be no 200-million-year-old Jurassic Park, he notes with a laugh, but “people have asked me to do a Cretaceous Park expedition.”

Scientific digs here have unearthed fossilized fish, turtles, giant crocodiles, lizards, boa constrictors, a small saber-toothed tiger, even horses, camels, rhinoceroses and the ancestors of today’s bats, cats, rats and dogs, said paleontologist Bruce Lander of Altadena.

Since 1987, Lander’s firm--Paleo Environmental Associates--has been hired by Waste Management of California to keep the Simi Valley Landfill in compliance with county environmental guidelines.

When county officials issued a permit for the landfill, they knew the site was one of hundreds of paleontological gold mines across Ventura County. As a condition, the operator was required to keep scientists on hand a few days each week, county officials said.

Over the last 10 years, Paleo Environmental has processed tens of thousands of pounds of rock and soil and unearthed about 2,000 identifiable fossils, Lander said.

Still, fossil hunting is not as simple as showing up in Simi Valley or Pine Mountain near Ojai with a chisel, some water and a spaghetti strainer.

Best bet, amateur fossil aficionados say, is to connect with one of three gem and mineral clubs in Ventura, Thousand Oaks or Oxnard.

Cheryl Council of the Conejo Gem and Mineral Club said members have found hundreds of species of fossils from the Conejo Valley to Santa Barbara. One member even found whale bones while digging a trench in his Westlake Village backyard.

That is part of the allure for fossil collectors, she said. People can imagine the unimaginable, such as the ocean covering the Conejo Valley.

“You just get this picture in your mind that people don’t usually have,” she said.

Fossil hunter Ray Meisenheimer and others in the Ventura Gem and Mineral Society have dug into the county’s back country for years, finding everything from giant clam shells in Piru to a fossilized turtle on the Rincon to a 15-million-year-old sand dollar on Pine Mountain.

“It’s the history,” he said. “It tells you what the land was like and what the county was like before we were here.”

Still, you won’t catch Meisenheimer at today’s opening of “The Lost World: Jurassic Park.”

He hasn’t been to a movie in 40 years. Oh, he caught the film’s blockbuster predecessor on video . . . after his daughter and grandson all but forced him to watch it.

“I didn’t think it was that great,” he said. “It’s only make-believe.”