Jack O'Neill's not the only legend residing at his Pleasure Point compound.
Sixty years ago, Jack O’Neill invented the wetsuit. Three- to five- million years ago, Pliocene-era whales became extinct. The two might seem unrelated, but last week an extremely low tide in front of Jack O’Neill’s house at Pleasure Point revealed the skeleton of a giant, dinosaur-like creature. After surfers found the bones on Wednesday, the discovery attracted attention from scientists and researchers in the area – some believed it might be a dinosaur.
Director of University of California Santa Cruz’s Institute of Marine Sciences, Gary Griggs, said the skeleton was not a dinosaur’s, but most likely from a Pliocene-era wale.
“The rocks exposed along the coastline here near Pleasure Point are marine sedimentary rocks of the Pliocene Purisima Formation, about 3-5 million years old,” Griggs told the Huffington Post. “They formed in a shallow marine environment and contain lenses of mollusc shells as well as numerous marine mammal fossils.”
“As exciting as it might have been, (there is) no way that these are dinosaur bones,” Griggs told KSBW. “The dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago, so there is a huge time gap between the two.”
While it’s possible to extract the million-year old bones from the tidal zone for further, the process is delicate and costly, and no organization has yet decided to take on that project.
Just goes to show there’s more than a few legends up at the O’Neill compound these days.
For more information and pictures of the whale skeleton check out KSBW.com.
