Sunday, May 9, 2010

Beautiful new baleen whale skull

Hey Folks,

Thursday evening I received an email from by buddy Karl Heiman, who co-discovered a mysticete skeleton at a seawall construction project last April; the skeleton was headless, but nonetheless is a beautiful find (the excavation was conducted by PaleoResource Consultants and covered here and here). Anyway, on Thursday, as part of the same project, Karl was watching as a backhoe dug a trench, and the bucket chewed right through a rather large bone.

After some careful digging, it turned out to be a nearly complete baleen whale skull - photos he sent me yesterday show what it looked like after it had been entirely excavated in the field: about 5 feet long, and only missing part of the right hand side - the left side of the skull is largely intact. I'll email Karl and ask for permission to use his photos, but otherwise - trust me, it's damn pretty; I almost shed a tear.

2 comments:

  1. When are you going to be out this way again? You might want to stop by our lab and check out the skull, as well as the odontocete.

    Dave Haasl

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  2. Hey Dave! Congratulations (and thanks!) on excavating the new whale. Is it in a jacket yet? I saw Dave Maloney in some of the pictures Karl sent me.

    I was going to email you about visiting anyway; I will be leaving MT later on in the month, and will be driving through Auburn on June 1st (a tuesday, I think). I'll be honest, I'm pretty anxious to see all the fossils you guys have collected.

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