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The San Mateo County Historical Association announced a first-of-its-kind research collaboration with the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum and the La Brea Tar Pits earlier this month.
Emily Lindsey, the assistant curator and excavation site director at the La Brea Tar Pits, catalyzed this effort when a set of Columbian mammoth teeth in the SMCHA’s archives seemed relevant to her study of what caused megafauna extinction at the end of the last Ice Age.
“We have a pretty good idea of the story of what’s going on in Southern California … but what’s going on in Northern California and the Pacific Northwest?” Lindsey said. “[We’re looking for] differences in timing of extinction based on the different ecological changes that are happening at that time, or differences in human population, abundance, technologies, cultures, things like that.”
After some initial analysis, Lindsey did not believe the collagen preservation needed to date bones was present in the mammoth teeth provided by the SMCHA. These specimens were unable to help provide answers regarding the extinction of the Columbian mammoth that once inhabited Northern California.
“I don’t think we’re going to be able to include [the teeth] in my part of the study, but there’s still a fun little mystery,” Lindsey said. “There may be other interesting analyses that can be done looking at, say, enamel isotopes or tooth wear, or other types of studies that might be interesting to other scientists.”
While these particular fossils were not ultimately relevant to Lindsey’s research, there are other applications for cross-institutional collaboration. Lindsey reflected that “the real goal is just to help track down these fossils.”
A colleague sent Lindsey a 1945 paper published in “Science,” an academic journal, reporting on a fossil discovery near San Francisco. The author, Frank Stanger, was deeply involved in the SMCHA since its founding and served as its president, so this paper was used to piece together what happened to other animal specimens found in the area.
The elephant bones, prehistoric horse teeth, as well as botanical and insect specimens Stanger discovered could play an important role in her research as well as in the San Mateo County History Museum’s upcoming natural history exhibit. Lindsey alongside the SMCHA are attempting to track down the rest of these fossils.
Cooperation between researchers and museums is as important to understanding history as the fossils themselves.
“So these [artifacts] are really valuable resources. They’re valuable for the community to learn about the heritage of their very specific area … but they’re really valuable for science because they create these much larger data sets that a lot of scientists don’t know about,” Lindsey said. “Something that’s really important that’s very much in danger of losing federally funded support is the larger scale databases and infrastructure that help people to find where all the specimens are.”
Lindsey said these comprehensive databases can be best achieved through collective research efforts like that between the La Brea Tar Pits, the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum and the SMCHA. Especially at a time when the San Mateo County History Museum hopes to become more involved in natural history again, the paleontological support Lindsey and her colleagues can offer the SMCHA is invaluable.
“Communicating to each other and getting connections help us spread education as well,” said Sean Campbell, a senior fossil preparator at the La Brea Tar Pits. “When I visited the [San Mateo County History Museum], they told me their plans for their natural history museum section, and it included the Millbrae mammoths, but it also included other things … These are connections that can help them with their exhibits and learning and education about the materials that they have because to my understanding, there’s not a paleontologist that actually works at the [San Mateo County Historical Association].”
The natural history gallery, set to open in 2026 as a part of the San Mateo County History Museum’s expansion, is a next step that will allow more of the specimens in its archives to be shared with the public.
“Our vision became, ‘Why don’t we find the space to do a full natural history gallery that would feature paleontology and the animals that once lived here?’” said SMCHA President Mitch Postel. “Now we’re looking at having a 2,700-square-foot space within our new addition to the museum, where we’ll show paleoparadoxia and other things … As we learn more and more, it gets more and more exciting.”
