Folks interested in visiting the Coso Range Wilderness near Olancha might want to combine petroglyphs, hiking, and general adventuring with a visit to a rather significant fossil locality in the Cosos to observe mineralized mammal bones weathering out of ancient sediments.
Just recently, over at http://inyo.coffeecup.com/site/coso/cosofieldtrip.html, I uploaded a page called "Field Trip To A Vertebrate Fossil Locality In The Coso Range, California". This is of course a completely personal, non-commercial web site.
It's a cyber-visit--with detailed text, plus on-site images and photographs of fossils--to the upper Miocene to upper Pliocene Coso Formation in the Coso Mountains, which lie in the transitional Mojave Desert-Great Basin region west of Death Valley National Park, near Olancha, along the eastern side of California's southern Owens Valley (with the Sierra Nevada in prominent view to the immediate west).
The Coso Formation is a roughly six to three million year-old geologic rock deposit that yields quite a number of mineralized mammalian remains some 4.8 to 3.0 million years old--including: a vole (the famous Cosomys primus, named for its occurrence in the Cosos); rabbits; meadow mice; a hyaenoid dog; peccaries; a mastodon; slender camelids; large grazing horses (including the famous Hagerman Horse--named for its spectacular occurrences at Hagerman Fossil Beds National Monument, Idaho--one of the earliest examples of the genus Equus, which of course includes all modern horses and equids); a large-headed llama; and a bear.
Additional paleontological specimens described from the Coso Formation include: ostracods (a minute bivalved crustacean); algal bodies (stromatolitic developments created by species of blue-green algae); diatoms (a microscopic single-celled photosynthesizing single-celled plant); fish--and, prolific quantities of pollen from conifers and angiosperms (flowering plants), palynological specimens that add invaluable paleobotanical information to the Coso cornucopia of paleontological significance.
Naturally, unless you've acquired a special collecting permit from the BLM, you can't keep anything you find in the Coso Range Wilderness--except on camera, but it's still loads of fun to hike around and see what kinds of fossil materials weather out of the sedimentary constituents.
The Coso Range is of course already world-famous for its remarkable abundance of petroglyphs. The fossil bones add yet another prehistoric dimension to the Coso story.
See for example, Huell Howser's California's Gold segment on the Coso petroglyphs, originally telecast on January 13, 2008, which can be accessed through either of the following URLs:
The Chapman University Huell Howser archives: https://blogs.chapman.edu/huell-howser-archives/2008/01/13/petroplyphs-californias-gold-10012/
And, by direct link to the video: https://vhost1.chapman.edu/files/videos/2016/09/15/14739819095c4ed-sd.mp4
