TORTOISE LIVED 400,000 YEARS AGO.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXIX, Issue 3327, 20 September 1911, Page 7

TORTOISE LIVED 400,000 YEARS AGO.

ANCIENT FOSSIL SHELL

Three thousand feet above sea- level, on the slope of Mount. Baldy, and fifty . •miles from, the coast of Orange County, U.S. Thomas Donlon found the perfect fossil of a huge sea tortoise, which Hector Alliot., curator of the Southwest Museum, pronounces the most important. discovery of the kind ever made in Southern California. Donlon has a bee ranch, and was seeking a> rock to hold down the lid of a hive when he saw ,the shell protruding from fhe ground. He dug it up, and it proved to- be solid stone, weighing 100 pounds, and showing the- exact- markings', and even some of the original color, on the back and yellow bottom. The specimen is nearly thirty inches in diameter. Alliot estimates that it is 400,000 years old, and beyond a doubt by far the most ancient'ever picked up on. the Western Hemisphere. It swam, in these seas, he says-, when _ California and all the territory this side of the Rocky mountains was still a mile or two under water. When the great earth spasm occurred which lifted the peaks, 1 of Mount Hood, Moupt Shasta, Mount St. Helena., Mount Rainier and Mount Whitney out of the depths and brought a. new land into being, this tortoise undoubtedly perished, Alliot believes, and, already petrified, was subsequently rolled and ground in the glacial period ice for 70,000 years. The marks of this show clearly. One flipper is intact. The head and edges of the shell were obliterated. Hundreds of immense petrified clams were found embedded in shale near the tortoise.