| An image courtesy a person who goes by the online name of "fossilhunter51." That single extended World War I-style infantry trench running along the hillside marks the precise trend of the Sharktooth Hill Bone Bed in the Middle Miocene Round Mountain Silt of the Temblor Formation, roughly 16 to 15 million years old. Note the surgical mask, worn in deference to Valley Fever fungus spores that infest the uncultivated soils of California's southern San Joaquin Valley. Valley Fever fungus spores are also endemic to California's Mojave Desert, San Fernando Valley, Santa Clarita Valley, and Coachella Valley--not to mention central to southern Arizona, southern Nevada, parts of New Mexico, southwestern Utah, and west Texas. |