A 13-year-old found a 5-million-year-old fossil, and now there's a new species of walrus named in his honor

Thu, 02/08/2024 - 18:30

A young teenager walks on the beach holding tools for excavating fossils and wearing a red jacket and backup — Forrest Sheperd as a teenager walking on the beach near where he found an ancient walrus skull.
Forrest Sheperd

A 13-year-old fossil enthusiast found a walrus skull in a boulder in northern California in 2011.
Eleven years later, a paleontologist has named the formerly unknown extinct species after him.
The toothless walrus probably lived near temperate bays in California about 5 million years ago.

In 2011, a 13-year-old fossil hunter on a beach near bluffs in Santa Cruz, California, happened across the find of a lifetime: the complete skull of an unknown 5-million-year-old walrus species encased in a giant boulder.