# Blackhawk Ranch Quarry **Domain:** Paleontology / Bay Area History **Doc Type:** Canonical Site Node **Maturity:** Developed ## Definition **Blackhawk Ranch Quarry** is a fossil locality on the flanks of Mount Diablo known for a rich Miocene vertebrate assemblage, including extinct mammals from ecosystems very different from today's Bay Area. ## Nexus Context The quarry appears in [[articles/The Evolutionary Roots of Silicon Valley|The Evolutionary Roots of Silicon Valley]] as a local demonstration that the region's natural history is neither static nor shallow. Its fossils are fragments from which paleontologists reconstruct populations, climate and ecological relations. That method interfaces with machine intelligence through pattern inference and with continuity through an important limit: reconstructability is not persistence. A system may infer a vanished organism or environment with increasing resolution without reviving its first-person existence. ## Sources / Provenance - University of California Museum of Paleontology, collections and locality records: https://ucmp.berkeley.edu/ - California Department of Conservation, Mount Diablo region geology: https://www.conservation.ca.gov/cgs ## See Also [[wiki/Mount Diablo|Mount Diablo]], [[wiki/Paleontology|Paleontology]], [[wiki/Fossil Record|Fossil Record]], [[wiki/Reconstructed Person|Reconstructed Person]]