DOWNTOWN’S COMMUNITY NEWSPAPER MARCH 2009
San Diego Community Newspaper Group
www.SDNEWS.com ! Volume 11, Number 3
An elephant, a fish and the monster that ate ’em Downtown discoveries revive speculation on area’s prehistoric climate, mammoth’s diet By MARTIN JONES WESTLIN Before you start pointing fingers, heed us: We’re well aware that modern elephants are child’s play compared with the mammoths, their colossal and very distant relatives. We also know that fish aren’t members of the whale family, as they breathe through gills, not nostrils and lungs. The recent Downtown discoveries from prehistory are profound indeed, and for your protection, we thought we’d better choose the words in our headline carefully (here at Downtown News, we’ve always got your back). But the monster is a real element in last month’s East Village excavations of two sets of remains — those of a Columbian mammoth (a genus that went extinct during the last Ice Age) and a prehistoric baleen whale, possibly a California gray. The monster takes the form of several landmass and climate shifts that have claimed boatloads of creatures over eons; the latest finds date anywhere from 500- to 600,000 years ago and were discovered during construction work on the new Thomas Jefferson School of Law building at 11th and Island avenues. The mammoth bones, includ-
ing the skull with right and left upper molars, both tusks, the right lower molar and probably the left, were unearthed Feb. 4 under about 20 feet of ground. The whale remains, which include several ribs and the lower jaw, were found Feb. 26. The bones were taken to the San Diego Natural History Museum in Balboa Park for further study and perhaps for an exhibition some months down the line. The discovery of animal fossils isn’t big news around here, at least in the county’s northern portion. The land under Carlsbad and Oceanside is the site of many such discoveries, notably a set of giant mastodon bones found in the summer of 2007; the presentday Anza-Borrego Desert apparently had mammoths and even camels in it until about 300,000 years ago. But two things excite natural history museum paleontologist Tom Demere about the current mystery: The whale find is a first for San Diego County, and those bones were buried only 10 to 15 feet deeper than the mammoth’s. “This is just a hypothesis,” Demere said, “but the animals were separated by about a hundred-thousand years in time. The whale was living here during a period of global warming and a high sea level (about 600,000 years ago). The mammoth was living here (100,000 years later) COURTESY PHOTO during a period of global cooling Woody, grassy vegetation may dot the present-day San Diego County landscape, but virtually all of it has been planted, as this region is basically pretty arid. In the Columbian mammoth’s day, it was a different story, as depicted above. A set of SEE BONES, Page 4 mammoth bones was unearthed Feb. 4 in Downtown’s East Village.
Faye Miller was SD’s grass-roots matriarch
Faye Miller
In keeping with her love of American history, the late Faye La Vonne Miller was the central figure in a life celebration on Feb. 12, Abraham Lincoln’s 200th birthday. By then, Downtown San Diego was feeling the effects of Miller’s Jan. 20 passing at the age of 83--such was the extent of her political activism and her concern for the center city. Miller had been active in Downtown political and civic affairs since 1987, when she moved to the Marina District to be part of the Downtown renaissance envisioned
by ex-Mayor Pete Wilson. For the next 22 years she was a consummate Downtown promoter, and her home was headquarters for her community and political involvement. She served on host committees for Govs. George Deukmejian and Wilson, Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Christine Kehoe, Congresswoman Susan Davis and San Diego City Councilmembers Kevin Falconer, Jim Madaffer and Toni Atkins. She thus embraced SEE MATRIARCH, Page 8
School funding cut reversal aids near-D’town campuses BY SEBASTIAN RUIZ | DOWNTOWN NEWS
The San Diego Unified School District Board of Education voted to return thousands of dollars in federal funds to Pacific Beach and Ocean Beach elementary schools that it had voted to cut at its Jan. 27 meeting. The board voted unanimously on Feb. 17 to restore the original plan to distribute next year’s federal funds to elementary, middle and high schools
with 40 percent or more students on the free and reducedprice lunch program. Pacific Beach Elementary was poised to lose approximately $31,000 because of the board’s previous decision to allocate next year’s federal funds to schools with 60 percent or more students that qualify for the subsidized lunches. SEE FUNDING, Page 5