In Santa Cruz County of California, scientists have unearthed a massive fossilized skeleton from a construction site.
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The stays belong to a mysticete whale, an ancestor to the baleen whale, mentioned Scott Armstrong, a scientist with Paleo Options, a Los Angeles County-based mostly archaeological consulting service.
The relatively intact fossil is around 25 feet long and Pieces of the skull, a large part of the jaw, shoulder blades, arm bones and vertebrae were found.
Armstrong told the newspaper that the remains barrels its way into the hills via earthquakes and movements of tectonic plates.
“Most locations the place you see a hill, someplace there is a fault line close by pushing it up”, he mentioned. These faults are quite inactive but it is from raising thousands or perhaps millions of years back, he added.
The excavation process started on Thursday, as workers utilizing hoes, brooms, shovels, and smaller tools gradually unfolded the prehistoric bones.
The group of experts were assigned to assess a housing project site in Scotts Valley at Santas Village Road, when the remnants were excavated.
An archeologist and two paleontologists were able to find the fossil of a prehistoric whale, believed to be about four million years old.
The fossiled remains were discovered on 4th September and taken to the office of Paleo Solutions in Monrovia after an inventory was taken.
“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”.
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.
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Matthew Clapham, a paleontologist at UC Santa Cruz has been strongly impressed by the new discovery. “So this sounds like it’s a very impressive find”. “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”, Clapham said.
