19173 Lompoc Deposits 



teacher of Zoology in the Los Angeles High School, 

 who then gave me a very fine and perfect fossil blue- 

 fish which he had obtained from a brickyard in Los 

 Angeles. In other places about the city and in the 

 neighboring county of Orange, also, he secured some 

 dozens of small fishes. All these, and a few more from 

 Lompoc to the north, we described in a joint paper 

 on "The Fossil Fishes of Southern California." 



Lompoc lies on the north side of the Sierra Santa 

 Inez, which forms the backbone of Santa Barbara 

 County. This locality was first visited by Gilbert, 

 then by Willard J. Classen, a Stanford student, and 

 later by myself. It proved to contain one of the 

 most remarkable fossil-fish deposits ever found, sev- 

 eral thousand specimens, many of them well pre- 

 served, having been obtained there. These species I 

 described in a paper entitled "The Fossil Fishes of 

 the Diatom Beds of Lompoc, California." In a more 

 elaborate memoir, "Fishes of the California Ter- 

 tiary," also published by the University, I gave fine 

 restorations of nearly all of them, the work of Wil- 

 liam S. Atkinson, our scientific artist. 



A surprising feature of the Lompoc deposits is the AMiocme 

 presence on a certain "horizon" of millions of speci- ^^""^'^y 

 mens of an extinct herring known as Xyne grex, dif- 

 fused over four miles of surface wherever the stratum 

 in question has been laid bare. As the individuals 

 are all adult, one may presume that they entered the 

 primeval flask-shaped bay to spawn, then were 

 smothered by their own numbers, and finally buried 

 under clouds of w^hite diatoms. The deposit of these 

 siliceous shells of minute plants, each too small to be 

 visible to the naked eye, reaches here a depth of 1400 

 feet. The probable details of this alleged incident 



