Most high schoolers only get to study fossils through textbooks, videos, and the occasional museum field trip. Students at San Pedro High School in Los Angeles got the stranger version: in 2024, a construction project under their own campus turned up millions of fossils, some from a marine world nearly 9 million years old.

When a construction project to renovate the school kicked off in 2022, fossils—ranging from a saber-tooth salmon to shorebirds and sea turtles to a prehistoric megalodon—started turning up pretty quickly. “I thought this stuff was something that never happens, especially around here,” student Taya Olson told KABC. “It only happens in textbooks.”

For the next two years, the fossil finds kept coming, with bones from sea creatures of all sorts eventually growing into the millions. “It represents an entire ecology of the ocean nine million years ago,” said Wayne Bischoff, director of cultural resources at Envicom Corporation.

The project has uncovered more than 200 species, but it could take years before experts know the true extent of the find. “The fact that millions of fossils have been unearthed on this site has led to a new era of concentrative studies that will bring notoriety to this community and this high school,” said Alberto Carvalho, Los Angeles Unified School District superintendent.

Located west of Long Beach on the Palos Verdes Peninsula, the campus was sitting over a richer fossil record than a simple two-layer description can capture. Public project updates have described four Late Miocene bone-bed layers, a Pleistocene shell bed roughly 120,000 years old, sea-turtle gastroliths, and roughly 9-million-year-old Miocene marine shells. Envicom described those Miocene shells as only the second recorded invertebrate fossils of that age on the Palos Verdes Peninsula.

“There’s never been this type of density of fossils ever found at a site like this before in California,” Bischoff told the newspaper, adding that the find confirms the existing scientific idea that ancient Los Angeles was once underwater.

The oldest fossils were trapped within diatomite, a rock made from fossilized algae. That algae-rich layer points to a nutrient-heavy marine environment that could have fed a variety of marine life, including dolphins and whales. Bischoff has said the mix of marine fossils and shore material has fed a still-hypothetical idea: a prehistoric island may have washed onto what is now the L.A. shore.

San Pedro High School’s Spring 2026 modernization update said the remodeled Building 3 would open in Spring 2026, Building 8 would then be vacated for the next construction phase, and magnet programs would continue operating at the Olguin campus during the 2025–2026 school year. Earlier LAUSD planning had projected construction through Q1 2026, so the campus work appears to have stretched into the next phase.

The fossilized finds are now mostly in the hands of researchers, including people working with the school district, the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium, Cal State Channel Islands, and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

Milad Esfahani, a San Pedro High School student, even got in on the research at the Natural History Museum by sorting fossilized shells. “It was sort of like gold panning,” he told the Times, adding he now hopes to become a marine paleontologist.

Working through the fossil beds can give researchers an unusually full look at the past, but the public record is still thin on formal scientific follow-up. “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.”