Prehistoric Animals

Read by Mary Ann Sanders, learn about the animals which were in the area we now call Stanislaus County from more than 60 million years ago to as recent as 10,000 years ago.In 1936, a local teenager, Allan Bennison, found the skeleton fossil of a hadrosaur, and later a mosasaur, in the Diablo Mountains of Stanislaus County. Columbian mammoths and mastodons roamed in the area until just about 10,000 years ago. Wild horses even continued to roam here until the mid-1800s.