Long Beach, Calif. ? A geologist searching for earthquake faults at a construction site found something even more earth-shattering: the 100,000-year-old fossilized remains of a North American camel.

Thursday’s discovery by Robert Lemmer yielded four vertebrae the sixth and seventh cervical vertebrae, the thoracic vertebra and a neck vertebra. On Friday, another neck vertebra was discovered in a 12-foot deep trench dug to search for quake faults in the parking lot of a bowling alley.

Camels originated in North America 15 million years ago, and as they died out on this continent, they spread to Africa and into the Middle East.