Builders dig beneath high school and discover megalodon shark

History and science have resoundingly been brought to life at a high school in Los Angeles, after extraordinary discoveries were made beneath the classroom floors.

A dazzling window to the distant past was unexpectedly flung open when renovation work began at San Pedro High School back in 2022.

As construction workers dug below the building’s foundations, they soon unearthed a seemingly bottomless treasure trove of fossils, dating back millions of years.

These ranged from a sabre-toothed salmon to a prehistoric megalodon – the now extinct species of shark that has spawned countless Hollywood blood-fests.

“I thought this stuff was something that never happens, especially around here,” student Taya Olson told local news network KABC. “It only happens in textbooks.”

- YouTubewww.youtube.com

Since the work began, more than 200 species have been uncovered, but it could take experts years to establish the true extent of the discovery.

“There’s never been this type of density of fossils ever found at a site like this before in California,” Wayne Bischoff, director of cultural resources at Envicom Corporation, told the Los Angeles Times.

He added that it proves the long-held theory that ancient LA was once underwater.

The campus, which is located west of Long Beach on the Palos Verdes Peninsula, was unwittingly sitting atop two different fossil hotspots – a nine million-year-old bone bed from the Miocene era, and a shell bed from the Pleistocene era, which is around 120,000 years old, according to the Los Angeles Times.

The oldest of the fossils were preserved within a fossilised algae known as diatomite, which could once have fed a variety of marine life, Popular Mechanics notes.

From right: the fossils of juvenile megalodon teeth; those from mako sharks; and from smaller sharks have all been unearthed under the school (Wayne Bischoff / Envicom Corp.)

Bischoff said that the extraordinary cache of fossils has prompted a new theory that an entire prehistoric island once washed onto what is now the LA shore, and that it offers an unprecedented insight into the past.

“It’s the entire ecosystem from an age that’s gone,” Bischoff told LAist.

“We have all this evidence to help future researchers put together what an entire ecology looked like nine million years ago. That’s really rare.”

Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter

How to join the indy100's free WhatsApp channel

Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings