n mid February I was invited by my colleague Dr. Win McLaughlin to give a talk at Southwestern Oregon Community College (SWOCC) which has a pretty fantastic science program. Win flew me up for the presentation and a couple of days of fieldwork during a rare dry spell on the perpetually rainy Oregon coast. I had not visited in over a decade, and was thrilled at the opportunity! Here is a bit of a slideshow from my trip.
The channel islands are often not visible from shore owing to fog on our coast, even in sunny socal - to the point where I had no idea until about two years ago that the ones in Santa Barbara could be viewed on a clear day from 101! Every time I had driven 101 before it was foggy. Here is a view of San Clemente Island from my flight, which lies about 70 miles (110 km) off the coast of San Diego.
The Lick Observatory, run by UC Santa Cruz, perched atop the summit of Mount Hamilton. Sarah and I visited the Lick in summer 2024. This is the first mountaintop observatory ever built, and has one of the two largest refractor telescopes ever built (the largest is at the Yerkes Observatory in Chicago, and the Great Lick Refractor is the second largest - but the only still currently in use).
A view of Mount Shasta from the air. You can really tell that it's an enormous stratovolcano from this perspective!
I finally got an opportunity to see "wally" the whale - a balaenopterid mysticete excavated from the Empire Formation near Coos Bay, Oregon. It's about 7-9 million years old. The specimen was excavated by members of a fossil club - NARG, the North American Research Group - an incredible feat for a group of avocational paleontologists. I'm thrilled that the specimen has entered a museum collection. There aren't many complete balaenopterid skulls from the Pacific coast; the only other one from the Tortonian is Parabalaenoptera from the Santa Cruz Mudstone at Bolinas in Marin County.
Here is wally with University of Oregon master's student Andy Quintanilla, who is putting the final touches on the preparation of the skull.
Andy has been working diligently, and owing to a thin veneer of rock in places that is nearly the same color as the bone, she's been leaving these lines etched into the rock as a quick visual reminder of what remains to be removed.
At least one of Wally's tympanic bullae (outer ear bones) has been prepared quite well! Here it is in ventral view, still articulated with the hidden petrosal/periotic and the squamosal. The likelihood of the bulla being removed from the skull is quite low.
My colleague Dr. Win McLaughlin holding a jaw of the rhino Teleoceras from the Miocene of Oregon that she and others excavated during her master's (during our U. Oregon visit).
A fabulous skull of a squalodelphinid dolphin from earlymiddle Miocene rocks of coastal Oregon. I wonder if the specimen is another example of Dilophodelphis, originally reported from the Nye Mudstone further north in Oregon - or if it is something else.
A partial skull in a very large boulder of an enaliarctine pinniped from the Astoria Formation, found either by Kent Gibson or Weylin Charland (I can't remember, but I think Kent rolled it off the beach) The braincase is on the right, and the rostrum is to the left and worn away; you can also make out the left and right zygomatic arches at top and bottom.
A sculpture of a mammoth outside the University of Oregon Museum of Natural and Cultural History. The sculpture was inspired by a mammoth trackway found at Fossil Lake in Oregon.
I accompanied Dr. McLaughlin around her farm during her morning chores. Here she is feeding her horses.
The Highway 101 bridge into North Bend over Coos Bay.
The morning of my talk, Dr. McLaughlin and I went to the type section of the Empire Formation along the shore of Coos Bay. In one large tidepool I saw more kelp crabs (Pugettia producta) than I had seen during my entire life. There were hundreds, if not thousands - and they were all large! Fortunately, I had my waterpoof Olympus camera and plunged my arm into the water for a few minutes. It was sooo goddamn cold - I think it was around 48-50 degrees.
I still have no idea why there were so many present. Win speculated that they were blown into the cove by currents, and that it had happened before in the winter in Coos Bay. The bedrock here is upper Miocene Empire Formation - you can make out a well-preserved scallop (Patinopecten oregonensis) immediately adjacent to the large reddish kelp crab!
Dr. McLaughlin summoning every serious fiber in her body to point out the location of the excavation site for "wally" the whale.
A beautifully preserved specimen of the scallop Patinopecten oregonensis.
A cetacean vertebra preserved in the Coos Conglomerate, which is a younger unit that cuts into the Empire Formation; this vertebra was probably eroded out of the Empire Formation.
Clinocardium (coosense or meekianum) from the Coos Conglomerate - reworked in a small concretion from the Empire Formation.
Dr. McLaughlin at Fossil Point - the type locality for the Coos Conglomerate.
Three rings - my wedding ring as scale for two large fish vertebrae; these are most likely Oncorhynchus rastrosus, the saber toothed salmon (formerly "Smilodonichthys").
Some kind of clam (Protothaca perhaps?) sporting a beautiful example of a borehole from a moon snail (Naticidae).
A reworked clam, possibly a Spisula (surf clam). It died and opened up after death, in soft enough sediment to permit the shell to open up, or on the seafloor - and then a small concretion formed prior to being reworked from the Empire Formation and into the Coos Conglomerate. This photo also highlights how many mollusks did not 'survive' like this and were fractured into little bits.
A rather large slipper snail, Crepidula princeps, from the Coos Conglomerate. This one was about 12 cm wide - one of the largest I had ever seen (until last week at Capitola in the Purisima Formation, stay tuned...)
Another lovely Patinopecten - this time, preserved in the Coos Conglomerate rather than the Empire Formation (though this is likely reworked from the latter).
My old friend Kent Gibson showed up and put together a great show and tell table with his many fossils from further north along the Oregon coast.
And I met some new collector friends - this is Jon Lang of Bandon, Oregon, who found this spectacular sandstone concretion with about twenty or so baleen plates preserved in three dimensions! Fragments of the palate are also preserved. One earlier specimen was reported by Earl Packard in the 1940s, but this specimen is much, much nicer. A couple of specimens have been reported from California in conference abstracts, and that *is it* for fossils of baleen outside the spectacular Pisco Formation of Peru. The crazy thing is that Jon straight up gave me this specimen for study! I couldn't believe it. I had to rearrange some of my stuff in my bags for the flight home...
The next morning I had a meeting with the director of the Charleston Marine Life Center (not THAT Charleston). While Dr. McLaughlin taught lecture, she let me borrow her car and I grabbed coffee and some donuts and headed out to eat a nutritious breakfast on the shore of Coos Bay. A bald eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) landed on a tree. I cautiously finished my donut and began assembling my camera and telephoto lens, expecting a trek through the mud to get to it. Before I got on my mudboots it flew off and toward me - I got the camera up just in time to take a half dozen snapshots; they're all quite good, but this one stood out. These may be old hat in the Pacific Northwest, but they're not terribly common in the San Francisco area where I grew up so they'll never get old for me.
At the Charleston Marine Life Center there were plenty of familiar critters in tanks - here is a young individual of the giant rock scallop, Crassodoma gigantea; they look quite scallop like as juveniles before they are fully settled in place and cemented to the substrate. It is surrounded with strawberry anemones (Corynactis californica).
One of the weirder, deeper water denizens of the Pacific coast: the large basket star Gorgonocephalus eucnemis. Basket stars are actually quite closely related to brittle stars, and are in the same order Ophiuroidea (and, therefore, technically a group of highly derived brittle stars); they filter feed, and are ecologically similar to crinoids.
And one unfamiliar to me in California - the unimaginatively named brown box crab - formerly Lopholithodes, but recently reassigned to a new genus Echidnocerus since Lopholithodes had apparently already been used. These unusual crabs are an unusual looking type of king crab - they are members of the Anomura, and like Alaskan king crabs, hermit crabs, and porcelain crabs - they only have three pairs of 'legs' unlike the true crabs, known as the brachyurans.
A lovely skeletal mount of a gray whale (Eschrichtius robustus) at the Charleston Marine Life Center. They have wonderful tanks below, and skeletons above.
Distinctive shell beds in the Pleistocene Port Orford Formation dominated by the tiny clam Psephidia.
A beautiful little gastropod, perhaps 2 cm long - no doubt something related to Nucella. I think this one is likely to be Nucella canaliculata (channeled dogwinkle).
This sort of in-situ weathering is common in mines in the southeastern USA, but is relatively rare on the Pacific coast - here, there are some platforms where the shell beds weather out from the rain and the shells just get cleaned off and sit there.
A beautiful clam that has weathered out of the siltstone of the Port Orford Formation.
Another clam that weathered out, just a few months too early for us.
A particularly gorgeous tall-spired gastropod - I'm not sure what it is, perhaps a Beringius.
A variety of clams weathering out - a multitude of minute Psephidia clams, several larger ones including Spisula or Cryptomya, and a rare example of a California mussel, Mytilus californicus.
A closeup of the California mussel, Mytilus californicus.
After a few hours it was time to head back and grab some food in Bandon. We stopped to photograph some tremendously large tree stumps which have been here for likely hundreds or thousands of years, and are driftwood that washed up on the beach, likely during storms, and then buried under a large sand dune - which is now eroding away, exposing the stumps.
The next day we visited Kent and Lucy Gibson in Newport, Oregon - my first time to their house since 2012 when I made a visit with Sarah, Ray Troll, and Smithsonian NHM Director Kirk Johnson.
Kent's collection has increased considerably since the last time I visited - everything used to be in this little lab space. Kent uses air scribes, a microblaster, and more recently, acetic acid to prep out specimens. Here is an acid prepared basking shark vertebra (probably Cetorhinus piersoni). Gibson collection.
A chunk of a pinniped skeleton from the Nye Mudstone - five thoracic vertebrae in articulation with a handful of ribs. Likely to be an enaliarctine, Enaliarctos or Pinnarctidion. Gibson collection.
If you're going to find a chunk of a baleen whale skull, it's best to find the vertex of the skull, or this part: this is the squamosal with an in situ periotic bone and part of a tympanic bulla. This one doesn't really need any additional preparation - it probably represents something like Parietobalaena. I do not think it's a specimen of Cophocetus oregonensis - the only formally published baleen whale from the Astoria Formation, published 90 years ago by Remington Kellogg and Earl Packard. Gibson collection.
An unusual specimen: a partial shell of a leatherback sea turtle from the Astoria Formation, belonging to the genus Psephophorus. This is an extinct leatherback with a thicker carapace than extant Dermochelys. The ossicles are quite large - and you can see at the lower left that they form a distinct ridge; in modern leatherbacks, there are five such ridges. Gibson collection.
A gorgeous braincase and basal rostrum of a kentriodontid dolphin from the Astoria Formation - perhaps one of Kent's nicest specimens. At a glance, it seems to compare well with other Pacific basin kentriodontids like Kentriodon nakajimai from Japan, Kentriodon diusinus from Baja California, and Mesokentriodon protohumboldti from Peru - but could conceivably represent the same taxon as one of the Calvert Formation kentriodontids. These dolphins from the Astoria Formation are numerous but have not received much if any study. Gibson collection.
A vastly more incomplete dolphin (?kentriodontid) skull - but one that is still quite anatomically informative as every little suture is very clearly preserved in cross-section. Specimens like this are almost best left unprepared, as mechanical preparation might be incapable of exposing similar detail underneath the concretion (acid prep, however, would do the trick). We're looking at the vomer, nasal passages, and the frontal bones separating the nasal region from the endocranial cavity on the left. Gibson collection.
Kent Gibson showing off his spectacular collection of dolphin skulls from the Astoria Formation (and a few from the Nye Mudstone). Most seem to be Astoria kentriodontids!
A whale vertebra in Kent's garden, overgrown now by moss. Kent made a comment about it starting to break down, but I thought it was rather beautiful in its current state. It struck me as an interesting metaphor for a handful of my own research projects I abandoned when I left the west coast in 2011; as I have grown older, my perspectives and skills have changed and my own observations have increased - the 'moss', so to speak, are all the things I would not have appreciated or thought about had I gone off half cocked and published a crappy paper in my mid 20s. Some things take time.
We stopped at a few spots to try and find puffins - no luck. Here are a bunch of surf scoters (Melanitta perspicillata), which are "sea ducks" that are a common sight along California beaches as well as Oregon. These birds winter in the subarctic and spend the spring and summer along the west and east coasts - though I never, ever saw one on the east coast. They're a very common sight in Half Moon Bay during the summer and I've seen them in Santa Cruz as well, though less frequently.
Dr. McLaughlin happily standing in for scale next to an enormous whale mandible - probably a fin whale (Balaenoptera physalus) by my reckoning - on display outside the Umpqua River Lighthouse near Reedsport, Oregon. A surprising number of modern whale skulls and mandibles have made it into local museums and displays like this after being trawled up off the Oregon seafloor by fishermen.
Dr. McLaughlin surprised me by taking me to a small swampy dell filled with these incredible carnivorous plants - Darlingtonia californica - also known as the cobra lily or the western pitcher plant. This species lives in the cold rainforests of the southern Pacific Northwest, in the northern Sierra Nevada and the coast range of Del Norte County, California, but chiefly in the coast ranges of central and southern Oregon; north of Humboldt County, California, these plants live in a belt along the coast.
Seal Rock State Beach, just south of Newport, Oregon. Several of Doug Emlong's holotype specimens of marine mammals were excavated in this area. Seal rock itself is a volcanic neck made of columnar basalt. No puffins here either =(
