| A Google Earch street car perspective that I edited and processed through photoshop. The view is slightly north of due west along a county road in the foothills of the Santa Ynez Mountains, above (north of) the coastal community of Santa Barbara, California. Here is one of numerous hairpin turns one encounters when one negotiates by vehicle the slopes of the Santa Ynez Mountains; note the vehicle up ahead, for scale, at roughly mid-left. Rocks exposed along the roadcut, directly ahead, belong to the middle Eocene Coldwater Sandstone--here, quite fossiliferous with mollusks--a locality that happens to lie near the famous Coldwater Clam Quarry, where I collected the two carbonized clam shells seen below (in the Bonus Fossils From The Santa Barbara Area section). Technical magnetostratigraphic investigations (a high resolution methodology that allows precise geologic correlations based on comparisons with the timing of past magnetic reversals in the Earth's poles) demonstrate that the Coldwater Sandstone is roughly 42.5 to 39.5 million years old, which places it squarely in the late Uintan through mid Duchesnean Stages of the Eocene Epoch. |