The past collided with the present in Scotts Valley when scientists discovered a whale fossil, as old as 4 million years, at a housing development site off Santas Village Road.
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Scott Armstrong, a scientist from Paleo Solutions and a Los Angeles County-based archaeological consulting service stated that the fossilized skeletons belong to a mysticete whale, a predecessor of the baleen whale. The relatively intact fossil includes pieces of skull, jaw, shoulder blades, vertebrae and arm bones.
Majority of locations which have a hill contain a fault line nearby, said Armstrong. “They’re comparatively inactive faults”.
The team of workers used shovels, brooms and small tools to slowly dig up the fossilized bones, making sure not to accidentally wreck the potentially fragile remains within the rock. “However yeah, it is from lifting 1000’s, perhaps thousands and thousands of years in the past”.
The potential was identified at the Scotts Valley project and a monitor assigned to follow construction vehicles found the fossil, Armstrong said.
Instead, scientists dug around the whale’s body and encased it in plaster, so that it can be transported to a lab where rock can be more precisely chiseled away from the bones.
“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”. In 2009, whale bones were excavated from the bluffs of East Cliff.
Matthew Clapham, paleontologist from University of California, also added that in his opinion the fossils found along the coastline, commonly has only fragments and not a wholly undisturbed structure from head to toe.
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“I consider the fossils you get alongside the shoreline, it is extra widespread to get a chunk of the cranium or the mind case or some bones”, Clapham advised the Sentinel. From that angle too, the present discovery could be helpful in understanding many interesting things about how the whales have evolved over millions of years. They either live on their own or affiliate to large groups of whales, with whom they communicate through very long and complex sounds.
