Show and Shell : Hiker Finds 15-Million-Year Old Oyster, Thinks It Holds a Fossil Pearl

While hiking in the Santa Clarita Valley one day in June, farm equipment salesman Dan Davis uncovered what is either a rare paleontological find or the fossilized equivalent of Al Capone’s vault.

Sticking out of the top of a hill in Bouquet Canyon was a 15-million-year-old oyster. There are lots of ancient oysters around, so there isn’t much scientific interest in them, even though they are so large that they would make oysters Rockefeller look like a snack.

What could make Davis’ discovery significant is what he suspects--and certainly hopes--might be inside his football-shaped mollusk: a Miocene Epoch pearl.

“We do see two masses. One of them could be a pearl,” the 38-year-old Davis told reporters Wednesday at Holy Cross Medical Center in Mission Hills. The press gathered as hospital officials prepared to use their $750,000 CT scanner to look inside the fossilized shell.

The scanner, which hospital officials have made available to Davis free, had previously detected the two masses, the larger of which is three-quarters of an inch across. Erwin Schwarz, the director of the hospital’s imaging services, scheduled more sophisticated tests Wednesday to determine whether the density of the hidden masses matched the density of the shell, since pearls are made of the same material as the oyster’s shell.

Some on hand were skeptical. Looking around at the crowd of reporters and curious hospital officials, one reporter shouted out, “Does Al Capone’s vault ring a bell?” The reference was to the Geraldo Rivera television special of a few years ago. With much fanfare, Rivera opened the vault and found nothing inside.

But for the moment, Davis thinks he may have better results. Wednesday’s examination showed that one of the objects inside the oyster does, in fact, have the same density as the shell.

Davis, a Northridge resident, said that, as a result, he is now “somewhere above 99%” certain he has a fossil pearl on his hands. He said he plans “in the very near future” to open it to find out.

That might change, he said, “if someone comes along and says he will give me $1 million” for the oyster as is.

According to George Kennedy of the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History, that is unlikely. He said there is probably some amateur fossil hunter who would like to have such an object. But he doubted that it would bring a price in the thousands of dollars, let alone $1 million.

Kennedy also has his doubts about Davis’ chances of finding a pearl inside his find.

Kennedy looked at several slides of the oyster before Wednesday’s test and said, “I’m not convinced at all that there is a pearl inside. Fossilized pearls are known, though they’re very rare.”

After hearing of the new test results, Kennedy said he would “still feel uncomfortable” calling the object inside the oyster a pearl.

As for the oyster itself, they were quite common millions of years ago, when much of California was under the sea. Davis’ oyster, like the other giants of that era, lay in the marine sediments. As time passed, the waters receded and erosion worked away at the ancient sediments, eventually exposing several inches of the oyster to the observant eyes of Davis, an amateur gold prospector.

“I saw a shell sticking out of the ground, so I unearthed it,” he said.

The object was huge for an oyster. “When you get oysters on the half shell, I wish they were this big,” he said.

Intrigued by his find, Davis called enough scientists to discover that nobody is much interested in an old oyster. Then he decided to see what was inside. He called Schwarz at Holy Cross, who agreed to X-ray it between patients. Schwarz said the hospital has X-rayed Halloween candy and other odd items, such as teddy bears. This was the first oyster.

Even if the shell turns out to contain a pearl, there could be legal complications. Prof. Susan French, who teaches property law at UCLA, cited language in state law that makes it a misdemeanor to “excavate upon, or remove, destroy, injure or deface” historic or prehistoric sites on public lands, including paleontological features. The question that Davis could face, she said, is whether a fossilized oyster would be considered a paleontological feature.

There are also rules against tampering with artifacts from an ancient civilization and against removing anything from a national park.

Davis refused to reveal precisely where his find was made, but said, “I can unequivocally say it was not in a national park.”

He added that he is in the process of hiring an attorney.

If the Davis find turns out to be a bust, the effort still was not wasted. Based upon what he saw in the CT scans, Kennedy said, the technology might prove useful in examining other fossils with delicate internal organs.

“Here is a way of looking at a structure without destroying it,” he said.