Bird
Middle Miocene
Round Mountain Silt, Sharktooth Hill Bonebed
Ernst Ranch, Bakersfield, California, USA

173mm bird femur found by Bob Ernst with his collection number. Extremely rare.

It’s tough to find a fossil bird bone expert when you need one.

Bob Ernst was one of the great Sharktooth Hill Bonebed collectors.  Across the 70’s, 80’s, 90’s, and up to the year of his passing in 2007, he collected various sites on his property.  He had no formal schooling in paleontology but he knew when he had found something unusual whether it was a bony fish, shark, ray, marine mammal, sea turtle, or bird.  He donated numerous specimens to various museums and gave away a lot of shark teeth to kids of all ages.