Hidden beneath concrete at San Pedro High School, construction workers found a buried secret — thousands of marine fossils echoing Palos Verdes Peninsula’s ancient geological past.

Researchers uncovered two distinct sites on campus where new buildings were under construction: a bone bed dating back 8.7 million years in the Miocene era and a shell bed about 120,000 years old from the Pleistocene era.

With construction of the buildings now completed, scientists are focusing on learning what they can from the fossils that date back several million years.

“There’s never been this type of density of fossils ever found at a site like this before in California,” said Wayne Bischoff, the director of cultural resources at Envicom Corp., who managed the collection of the fossils that were excavated. “It’s the largest marine bone bed found in Los Angeles and Orange counties.”

Bischoff said the marine fossils align with what researchers already knew: that for most of Los Angeles’s geological history, the land has been underwater.

“We’re kind of like detectives,” said Richard Behl, a geologist at Long Beach State.

Behl is testing the chemical and mineral composition of the fossil blocks, hoping scientists can learn more about these prehistoric environments including the atmosphere and the conditions that enabled animal remains to fossilize. “We got to find clues and piece those clues together.”

The fossils dating to the Miocene were encased in a type of fossilized algae called diatomite. Behl said the diatomite tells him that the area was nutrient rich with algae that supported a complex ecosystem including dolphins, fish and whales that crowded the area for food. Alongside the marine animals, Bischoff said he was excited to find an entire shore ecology that included skulls of sandpipers and pieces of driftwood in the bone bed.

“Once we started realizing that we had a mix of shore material … I started thinking that there may have been an extinct island off the coast,” Bischoff said.

The fossilized mandible of a sabretooth salmon is among the items found under the school.

(Wayne Bischoff / Envicom Corp.)

Bischoff hypothesized that during the Miocene era, a heavy storm washed plant and animal debris down from a prehistoric island into a submarine canyon before mud sealed the organic materials into a layer of sediment. Tectonic activity and receding ocean waters revealed those fossils after millions of years.

“After their experience on this site, [scientists] have started looking for other extinct islands,” Bischoff said. “It looks like there was a lot of islands that would form and then dissipate in the Channel Island zone.”

On campus, the construction of new buildings has beencompleted and 80% of the fossil blocks found in 2022 have been passed on to research and educational institutions, Bischoff said. Those fossils are now split among the Los Angeles Unified School District, the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium, Cal State Channel Islands and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

This summer, Austin Hendy, an assistant curator at the Natural History Museum who specializes in invertebrate paleontology, spent hours sifting and sorting through thousands of fossilized shells found in the shell bed.

Students from Betty Placensia Elementary School in Los Angeles tour the L.A. Underwater section at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

(Michelle Jimenez)

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The discovery has inspired at least one high school student to study the past as a way to understand the present.

“It was sort of like gold panning,” said Milad Esfahani, a San Pedro High student, who helped Hendy sort the fossils by size. “I would be tasked with looking for tiny, microscopic fossils like an 8th to 16th of an inch in size.”

It was the first time that Milad, a 17 year-old senior, had held a 125,000-year-old fossil and now he hopes to study marine paleontology at a university as he applies to colleges this fall.

The Natural History Museum hasn’t announced plans to display the fossils found under the school but already has a marine paleontology section on display called L.A. Underwater.

Hendy hopes that next summer he can work with another student to develop a display at San Pedro High School as part of the efforts to educate and engage the public on L.A.’s prehistoric past.

“Discovery can continue to happen — these blocks, they erode very slowly,” Hendy said of the fossil blocks extracted from the school. “We hope that the students and the public will be able to sort of clamber over these rocks in the years to come and be inspired by what they find.”

Although the work can be laborious and may seem pedantic to others, scientists such as Behl are drawn to this work because it reveals how our present is still being shaped by the Earth’s 4.54-billion-year history.

The discovery includes the fossils of hundreds of small fish vertebrae.

(Austin Hendy / Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County )

“It’s a real window into what the geography of the oceans and land were at the time when this occurred,” Behl said. “Even though that seems a long time ago, that has real impact upon everything we got today.”

In fact, many Angelenos rely on fossils to run everyday errands — they fuel our gas tanks.

“Those diatoms in that diatomite is what gives rise to the oil in Los Angeles” and the automobile and aeronautical industries, Hendy said. “The city owes its history to geology.”

Summer campers learn to sort fossils from San Pedro.

(Austin Hendy / Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County)

Aging infrastructure, short-term thinking, and ambitions that far outstrip its funding are just a few of the problems threatening the future of America’s vaunted civil space agency, according to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

In a report commissioned by Congress and released this week, experts said that a number of the agency’s technological resources are suffering, including the Deep Space Network — an international collection of giant radio antennas that is overseen by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge.

Report authors warned that NASA has, for too long, prioritized near-term missions at the cost of long-term investments in its infrastructure, workforce and technology.

“The inevitable consequence of such a strategy is to erode those essential capabilities that led to the organization’s greatness in the first place and that underpin its future potential,” the report said.

The choice facing the agency is stark, lead author Norman Augustine said Tuesday: Either the U.S. must increase funding for NASA, or the agency must cut some missions.

“For NASA, this is not a time for business as usual,” said Augustine, a former executive at Lockheed Martin. “The concerns it faces are ones that have built up over decades.”

Even as society at large has become exponentially more reliant on technology in the 60 years since NASA’s founding, federal investment in research and development has declined significantly over the decades, the study said.

This has been felt acutely at NASA, whose funding from Congress, adjusted for inflation, has plummeted from its Apollo-era high and remained essentially flat for decades.

NASA’s budget for years has hovered around 0.1% of total U.S. gross domestic product — less than one-eighth of its allowance during the mid-1960s.

Within the space agency, the report noted, science and technology funding has remained at a constant percentage within the budget even as missions have become far more costly and complicated.

As a result, NASA centers have only “low- to moderate-level efforts” underway to study emerging technologies that in a previous era might have been pioneered at the agency.

“NASA is a strong organization today, but it has underfunded the future NASA,” Augustine said.

The centers include JPL, where the report committee interviewed staffers at all levels of the organization.

JPL referred requests for comment to NASA.

“This report aligns with our current efforts to ensure we have the infrastructure, workforce, and technology that NASA needs for the decades ahead,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement provided by the agency. “We will continue to work diligently to address the committee’s recommendations — and drive our cutting-edge work on Earth, in the skies, and in the stars.”

Another key problem the report identified is neglect of NASA’s facilities, 83% of which have exceeded their designed life span. Attempts to repair and improve the agency’s infrastructure are stifled by a rule requiring a lengthy and labor-intensive review process for all requests over $1 million, a figure that has not changed since the rule’s inception despite a 30% increase in costs from inflation.

Employees at JPL in particular voiced concerns about this restriction, the report noted.

As a key example of a facility whose funding has failed to keep up with its increasing demands, the report highlighted the Deep Space Network, which makes up the world’s largest scientific telecommunications system.

JPL manages the network’s three terrestrial sites in Goldstone, Calif.; Canberra, Australia; and Madrid. The network’s budget has declined from $250 million in 2010 to roughly $200 million today, even as demands on it have increased.

As a result, the overburdened network has been forced to make costly compromises. During the Artemis I mission in late 2022, the lunar mission elbowed out all other scientific uses of the network, costing more than $21 million in data transmission from the James Webb Space Telescope alone.

The situation on the ground is not much better, the report noted. Basic infrastructure such as roads and pipes are failing at the sites, and their workforce is spread dangerously thin. Necessary maintenance and hiring would cost an estimated $45 million per year for the next 10 years, the authors wrote.

“This report is a wake-up call for NASA and political leaders,” said Casey Dreier, chief of space policy for the Planetary Society. “It identifies critical systemic issues that are already threatening NASA’s ability to pursue its ambitious program in exploration and science, issues that have been felt but not quantified until now. We have a 20th century infrastructure for a 21st century space program.”