The wife of the institution's founder decides to auction off the collection. A group from the museum purchases some items, but their $24,000 in donations doesn't go far.
For the crew from a small Bakersfield museum, the trip home from an auction house in Los Angeles was bittersweet. They had managed to retrieve some of the fossils that had been on display at the museum for years, but many others were left behind, out of reach forever.Their two SUVs were packed with what museum supporters could acquire for the $24,000 they'd raised: ancient whale vertebrae, a dolphin skull, teeth from an array of sharks and the four-tusked hippopotamus-like desmostylus — all collected locally. The cast of a baleen whale skull and four passengers were jammed into a Suburban that belonged to Koral Hancharick, the Buena Vista Museum of Natural History's part-time director.
"It was quite sad," she said. "It was wonderful to purchase as many things as we did, but it was heartbreaking to see specimens sold."
The 15-year-old museum was started largely to house fossils unearthed by Bob Ernst, an enthusiastic amateur paleontologist. Ernst owned about 400 acres of barren ground near Bakersfield that holds a vast trove of fossils from the Miocene Epoch, a time 14 million to 16 million years ago when much of the region lay beneath an inland sea.
Sitting next to Sharktooth Hill, a national natural landmark, Ernst's property has one of the richest deposits of marine mammal bones anywhere, said Jere Lipps, a UC Berkeley professor of integrative biology. It's part of a formation, known as the Round Mountain Silt, frequently likened to the Dinosaur National Monument in scientific importance.
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View entire article here: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-bakersfield-fossils-20101229,0,5936245.story
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