RIVERSIDE, Calif. _ A Tustin, Calif., man may have found a piece of history right in his backyard, or, in this case, his son's backyard in Riverside.
Gary Braithwaite, 65, said he believed some kind of metal, perhaps a meteorite, was lying beneath the surface of his son's lawn in the Casa Blanca area of Riverside. His endeavor to dig for that metal uncovered what he believes is an ice age bobcat.
A UC Riverside paleontologist is planning to excavate the remains to see if that's the case.
Jess Miller-Camp, a museum scientist at UC Riverside who specializes in vertebrate paleontology, initially said she thought it might be a bobcat. After checking with a colleague, she said it was more likely that the animal is a dog or a coyote.
Because of the soil conditions, she said, she thinks it very likely could be from the Pleistocene epoch, which ended with the most recent ice age, about 12,000 years ago. She plans to gather some students in the coming weeks to help unearth the bones and determine what they are.
Braithwaite said he'd been showing his son how to locate his sprinklers using a dousing rod _ which he constructed from two wire hangers.
"He was walking around and found an anomaly," Braithwaite said, "and then he found another."
Braithwaite said he believed the anomalies indicated there was metal beneath the surface. During Thanksgiving week, the two men began digging holes on the sites. About 4 feet down one hole, Braithwaite found what looked like bones. He was trying to dig around the bones with his shovel when he knocked the teeth loose.
"It was an absolute bizarre lucky find," he said.
