Whale Fossils Discovered In Mountains Of California By Construction Workers
A group of construction workers made an unusual discovery while working in the mountains of California — whale fossils.
According to the United Press International, the construction work was taking place at a residential location in Scotts Valley, California, a community in the Santa Cruz Mountains. The project had to temporarily be put on hold as a group of archaeologists worked to remove the ancient whale fossil, believed to be as many as four million years old.
A team of experts were called in from the Paleo Solutions, a Los Angeles County-based archaeological consulting service, to safely, and carefully, remove the bones from the ground, a process which started on September 17. With small shovels, brooms, and hand tools, the archaeologists began excavating the whale, which is an ancestor to the baleen whale. The bones were very soft, making it nearly impossible for the scientists to remove them without them breaking. Therefore, they decided to encase the bones in plaster so that they could take them back to the Paleo Solutions’ office in Monrovia, in Southern California, to be examined and removed from the rocks.
Wow! 4 million year old whale fossil in Scotts Valley. Predates Turbo Pascal and Windows 3.11. http://t.co/qGXeP4pVYb
— Anders Ohlsson (@suited_aces) September 18, 2015
“If the bone is softer than the rock, it makes it very difficult because it’s hard to chip through the rock without breaking the softer bones, but we’ll get it,” Paleontologist Scott Armstrong said.
So, how did whale fossils end up in the mountains?
Armstrong told the Santa Cruz Sentinel that in California, “most places where you see a hill, somewhere there’s a fault line nearby pushing it up,” meaning that the bones have been pushed upwards by tectonic pressure.
“They’re relatively inactive faults. But yeah, it’s from lifting thousands, maybe millions of years ago,” Armstrong said.
Last week, the team of excavators carefully unearthed parts of the skull, a large portion of the jaw, vertebrae, shoulder blades, and arm bones from the 25-foot long whale. While it is common to find shark teeth and other marine fossils in Scotts Valley, Matthew Clapham, a paleontologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said this find is very impressive and important.
“I think of the fossils you get along the coastline, it’s more common to get a piece of the skull or the brain case or some bones,” Clapham said. “So this sounds like it’s a very impressive find.”
“That’s an interesting time in whale evolution,” Clapham added. “A lot of whales were starting to evolve from their early ancestral group so this specimen, depending on how complete it is, could say a lot of interesting things about the evolution of whales.”
The discovery of the whale fossil comes just days after the Inquisitr reported that a humpback whale nearly crushed a pair of kayakers off the coast of Northern California.
[Photo via Shutterstock]
