Excavation of the holotype skull and skeleton of Tokarahia kauaeroa - nicknamed for a while as the "big scapula mysticete" - OU 22235. Photos by Ewan Fordyce, 1990s.
Nobody wants to be forever defined by their Ph.D. research - for a number of reasons: you might get sick of the topic through saturation, and want to see something different - or maybe you don't want to be boxed in to that topic and let it define you for the rest of your life. It's a bit like an actor who's been typecast. I studied eomysticetid whales for my Ph.D. in New Zealand from 2012-2015. When I finished up, eomysticetids were thought to be a relatively diverse, well-defined radiation of long-snouted baleen bearing mysticetes, possibly with vestigial teeth. Their radiation was short lived, as all their fossils are known from Oligocene age marine rocks (~30-23 million years in age). Despite this short time frame, they managed to travel across the world's oceans quite rapidly, being found in Japan, New Zealand, the Pacific Northwest, South Carolina, and Europe (Paratethys sea deposits); isotopic evidence confirms they ate prey relatively low in the the food chain (sorry, trophic ladder is the preferred term these days) and perhaps even migrated. I published most of my thesis chapters in 2014-2015, with a couple later in 2017 - and shortly thereafter started working chiefly on fossil odontocetes from Oligocene rocks in Charleston, South Carolina, where I still am. I'm immensely proud of my work on eomysticetids, and still think these are the highest quality, most informative, and carefully interpreted papers that serve as the defining work on the clade.
A slide from a talk I presented at the 2014 Geological Society of New Zealand meeting - the specimen on the right is the holotype of Tokarahia kauaeroa, not yet named.
In 2015, when I began this job, I was happy to leave behind eomysticetids as I *thought* that I had done a good job 'writing the book' on them, so to speak: I had a half dozen published articles naming and stabilizing the taxonomy of the family, firmly establishing a solid list of synapomorphies, interpreting the bauplan and functional anatomy of the earliest 'true' baleen-bearing mysticetes (Chaeomysticeti), and even aspects of their taphonomy, biogeography, and possible survival into the Miocene. I thought the book was closed on them - and on the seventh day, I rested (and promptly got to work climbing up the other side of the cetacean tree of life to work on early dolphins).
A skull of Micromysticetus rothauseni which I referred to the species in my 2017 paper on Matapanui - this is CCNHM 169, I first saw it shortly after it had been prepared in October 2012. I've got this specimen about halfway described in my notes.
But it seems I cannot escape these lovely beasts. I knew that there were some nice eomysticetid skulls needing study here at the Mace Brown Museum of Natural History, but given the glut of papers I had just published, there was more to be gotten by studying the far more important early odontocetes in our collection, as well as the toothed baleen whale we would name a couple years later as Coronodon havensteini. Further, in 2016 and 2018, two new mysticetes were named from the Pacific Northwest - Sitsqwayk and Maiabalaena - which were supposedly *not* eomysticetids, despite possessing all of the obvious synapomorphies. Further, the 2018 study of Maiabalaena pitched the daring proposal that Maiabalaena lacked teeth *and* baleen, and that baleen whales went through a toothless, baleen-less intermediate stage prior to the evolution of Eomysticetidae. Suddenly I was getting emails from my colleagues on the west coast - including one of my unofficial mentors, Tom Deméré, asking me over numerous phone calls about the exact pattern, distribution, size, and shape of palatal foramina in the eomysticetid whales I had studied in New Zealand, and in one of our specimens here at the Mace Brown Museum of Natural History. And here I thought that I had published such straightforward science from my Ph.D. that eomysticetids would never be controversial - now, they were being brought in to bear in the great debate over the origin of baleen! I never imagined.
Spoiler: Sitsqwayk and Maiabalaena are both eomysticetids, and are not very relevant towards the origin of baleen, and you can read the proof of that on April 14.
The holotype skull and skeleton of Sitsqwayk cornishorum on display at the Burke Museum. Photo taken by Ron Eng.
The holotype skull of Tokarahia lophocephalus, as prepared (left) and as encountered in the field during excavation (right), from Marples (1956). The skull was lost sometime between Marples' retirement and the arrival of Ewan Fordyce at Otago, likely thrown in the rubbish skip when the Biology Department moved buildings in the late 1960s.
A bit of background. The very first eomysticetid whales were named back in the 1950s by kiwi arachnologist Brian Marples - including "Mauicetus" lophocephalus and "Mauicetus" waitakiensis from the Kokoamu Greensand (late Oligocene) of New Zealand (South Island). Three things happened in parallel. 1) In 1975, a nearly complete long-snouted mysticete skull was discovered in what would later be named the Chandler Bridge Formation of Summerville, South Carolina (only a few miles from where I am typing this with a warm cuppa), and eventually published as Eomysticetus whitmorei by Al Sanders and Larry Barnes in 2002. 2) Ewan Fordyce, shortly after getting the University of Otago paleontology program funded by National Geographic, goes off and starts digging up a ton of Oligocene cetaceans and penguins from the Kokoamu Greensand and Otekaike Limestone of New Zealand - setting the stage for my Ph.D. research. 3) An unusual skull is discovered in 1981 in Oligocene rocks of the island of Kyushu in Japan - preserved in a concretion and slowly prepared over the following two decades; it is briefly described by Yoshihiko Okazaki in 1995 and formally named Yamatocetus canaliculatus in 2012. The naming of Yamatocetus was quite timely, right after I arrived to begin studying eomysticetids - I ended up providing new genera for both "M." lophocephalus and "M." waitakiensis - Tokarahia and Tohoraata, respectively - though these genera were based on more complete material, Tokarahia kauaeroa and Tohoraata raekohao, with the species named by Marples transferred to these new genera. I also named Waharoa ruwhenua and Matapa waihao, the latter of which had a genus name preoccupied by a goddamn butterfly from Sri Lanka, so I re-named it Matapanui waihao.
Loading up the trailer outside the geology building with all of our tools and supplies.
Ewan Fordyce organizing tools from the museum basement. I am not a morning person, and slept in, and still had a half hour walk to campus - and I recall Ewan was a bit cross with me that morning.
In January 2013, about a year into my program and when I was just about getting my legs under me, we got a call from the quarry operator at Haugh's* Quarry - also called Hakataramea Quarry or just "Haka" (or HQ in most of our notes). The operator indicated that they had done some grading, and were about to shut down quarry operation for the fall/winter, and had found quite a lot of bone in the exposed parts of the quarry. Remember, southern hemisphere: February in NZ is basically August, March is September - and because NZ is quite far south (45S, comparable to Seattle and Portland in terms of climate) - it is rainy and overcast nearly half the year; winter is long, cold, and wet, and summer is brief and cool. Those are the basic two seasons: summer is from December to February/mid March, and winter basically lasts from late March through to September/October - owing to the Antarctic climate - it's quite binary. This means most of our fieldwork had to balance the weather, as well as the quarry activity.
*Pronounced like "Whores". The first time I heard this at an SVP talk by Fordyce in 2005 - my first ever SVP at the age of 20 - my jaw hit the floor. My labmate Felix Marx assured me it was some strange Irish name. 'Haka', by the way, with the kiwi accent, was usually pronounced like "hecka", which I always found a bit charming.
Hakataramea quarry, August 2013. The bench up at the top (but to the right of this image) is where the 2013 excavations were, near the top of the Otekaike Limestone.
We headed up to the quarry on a beautiful January morning and sure enough, found two mysticete skeletons and lots of other bones in the area. Accompanying us were Travis Park, then a Ph.D. student at Monash University in Australia, and Alan Tennyson, a paleornithologist I quickly befriended at Te Papa Tongarewa National Museum of New Zealand in Wellington. Travis had flown into Wellington for a research trip and had driven down to Dunedin - they also both participated in a necropsy of some beaked whales near Invercargill with us. Upon searching more, we also located at least two odontocete skeletons and a penguin skeleton. I recall pulling a 4 cm long mako-like tooth out from one of the skeletons and remarking "you know, the exact species this belongs to has never really been figured out" - Fordyce shrugged and told me to get on with the penguins and cetaceans and didn't seem to interested in isolated teeth.
Ewan Fordyce beginning a trench with his famous chainsaw - he would take a break, and we would go through and dislodge each block with a pick and cart them off into a pile.
Marcus Richards (left), Sophie White (middle) and Felix Marx (right) uncovering an eomysticetid whale at Hakaramea Quarry.
Ewan Fordyce powering up the Pionjar rock drill while Sophie White (in back) and Yoshi Tanaka (right) watch. Every time a power tool was started up was a brief little lecture on use and safety. You can see the pile of discarded limestone blocks, as well as the wooden planks on the plaster jacket that would permit the use of metal rollers to move the jacket around; this is the smaller jacket with a scapula inside.
We uncovered some material, and came back a month later in February - it was still quite nice out. One of the two mysticetes included a nearly complete scapula and some ribs, and sadly, not much else - this specimen was quickly trenched and undercut with Fordyce's chainsaw, and then jacketed. The other mysticete had a bit more overburden and was proving to be quite large. I only have photos from the earlier stages of the excavation - we brought out a generator and powered 'zip guns' and even an airscribe as Felix Marx attempted to remove the tympanic bulla so we could get an identification. We returned in March for an overnight visit, staying in bunkbeds at a youth hostel in the sprawling metropolis of Kurow, Fordyce's favorite spot for stopping for ice cream at the local dairy* after digging. The mattresses were literally foam - which was surprisingly comfortable. By the time we returned for this weekend in March (remember, September here) it was already quite a bit cooler. On the second day, we had most of the big skull outlined - and it seemed to be about 2 meters long, with at least one mandible - and the jacket ended up being about 2.5 meters, as there were some associated elements near the back of the skull.
*Dairies are what convenience stores are called in NZ - chiefly because they sell milk cartons, but more importantly perhaps, is that they also sell one of the staples of a NZ diet - killer ice cream. NZ has the best ice cream in the world, I'm convinced, and definitely makes up somewhat for some of the unfortunate culinary choices elsewhere in NZ. Ice cream is also "cheap as chips" as they say down there - 2/3 the cost of ice cream in the US, and when served on a cone, a single NZ scoop is about the size of a baseball with an extra half scoop added. This is typically the volume of a 'double scoop' at most ice cream parlors in the US.
Ewan Fordyce holding the jacketed section of mandible that was sticking off to the side after returning to campus - photo from the Otago Daily Times.
The tympanic bulla of the eomysticetid whale exposed during fieldwork.
Ewan busy photo-documenting the new eomysticetid skull, while Sophie White (crouching) watches; Yoshi Tanaka is in the background.
Sadly, I did not participate in the completion of the excavation - within two days of returning I started developing this strange rash in my armpits, belly, chest, and thighs - had I caught some strange fungal infection from the hostel? After a few days of supreme discomfort, I went to the campus doctor, who diagnosed me with pityriasis rosea - a weird skin condition where you get rashes all over your trunk, and occasionally upper arms and thighs. Fortunately it is not permanent - but it does last for SIX TO TWELVE WEEKS! Fortunately my case did calm down and disappear after about eight weeks, but it was uncomfortable to walk, let alone do fieldwork, so I opted out of all field outings for the remainder of that fall. [I've since developed psoriasis, which is worse, and sadly permanent, though unlike pityriasis, it responds to treatment. Pityriasis, if you get it, is basically 2-4 months of misery - though like chicken pox, you only develop it once. It's also idiopathic - the origin and cause are unknown. In my case, it might simply be related to my overactive immune system].
Yoshi Tanaka (left) and Ewan Fordyce (right) looking simultaneously excited and defeated by the discovery of an even larger, more gigantic mysticete - this one was collected in a couple jackets that weren't quite as big, but I remember the bone scatter being about 6x12 feet across (2x4 meters). I couldn't participate.
I returned to the quarry, rash-free, the following spring, when we had to drag out the completed jacket which some of us nicknamed the 'star destroyer' owing to its distinctive triangular shape and massive size. Luckily, Fordyce had been able to store one jacket under a tarp in a safe area - the 'star destroyer' had been jacketed and flipped, but left in its hole. We had brought Fordyce's 'ute'* and a trailer to bring the jacket back to Dunedin. My memory is a bit fuzzy (this was 8-9 years ago now), but Fordyce used the chainsaw to cut out a nice ramp out of the excavation hole, and we used a series of wooden 'timbers' (2x4s) and metal pipes to coax the behemoth out of its sandy grave. We tied a rope around the jacket and then to the trailer hitch on his truck, and like a modern day version of Egyptian pyramid builders - began to tow the jacket slowly down this earthen ramp in the quarry, the crew of graduate students - all hands on deck if memory serves, about eight of us - running the 2x4's from behind the slowly moving jacket to build a temporary track in front of it. You see, with big jackets like this, we would install a wooden frame on one side so that when it flips over, it's 1) supported by the frame and 2) there's a nice flat hard surface that can work with metal rollers and slide over the concrete outside the Geology building and the floor of the museum.The jacket would roll along these metal pipe rollers, which were situated between the wooden pieces of 'track' we were constantly adding to in front of the jacket (and removing behind it), and constantly replacing the metal pipes out in front - it was beautifully coordinated. On a couple of occasions, the jacket started approaching the edge of the ramp, and we were worried it might roll sideways down the hill; much jostling of the jacket with crowbars was needed to gently nudge it back into the right direction down the ramp - you see, the ramp was curved - and once the truck started going around the curve, the jacket wanted to follow in a straight line rather than the curved safe path down the ramp. If memory serves, we either tried (or successfully) hammered one of our tools into the ramp and used it as a pulley to bend the rope in the right direction. At one or two points we weren't quite fast enough with placing the wooden planks in front of the jacket, and it did a brief nose dive into the sandy ramp, and refused to budge: the jacket was too heavy, and the substrate too soft, for the truck to just pull it without our Egyptian roller system. But, after an hour or so of this, we managed to get the enormous jacket rolled up a small ramp into the back of the museum trailer, safely stowed. After returning to Dunedin, Ewan indicated that this was the largest single plaster jacket he had ever collected, and in his typical understated fashion, stated that it was probably the single largest individual jacketed fossil collected from the country.**
*ute is short for utility vehicle in Kiwi slang - known in the US as a pickup truck.
**The heavyweight champion belt for largest single fossil from NZ, however, goes to Kaiwhekea katiki, an unusual aristonectine plesiosaur Ewan collected in the 1980s from a massive concretion collected in blocks; the whole concretion was like 20-30' wide. Also known as "Shagosaurus" given its locality, Shag Point. Shag as a British word usually reminds folks of Austin Powers (certainly the joke in the nickname) but Shag Point itself is named for cormorants, which are called shags in British English.
Adding "nose art" to plaster jackets was a time-honored tradition at Museum of the Rockies in Montana, and I brought it to NZ.
Some penguin bones found scattered around the quarry - Platydyptes, if I remember right.
A beautiful shell of the spiny, low-spired gastropod Guildfordia from Hakataramea Quarry.
The jacket did not get opened up until at least a year after I graduated - which was fine, since both Fordyce and I would have been sorely tempted to include it in my thesis had it been even partially prepared in time - and I was not interested in holding off on publishing since it would be difficult to return to NZ (and indeed, it will have been eight years next month, and I've not been able to). Ewan and my old labmate Marcus Richards indicated that the specimen was now likely an eomysticetid - while I did not know it at the time, I did actually participate in the collection of an eomysticetid whale in NZ.
Next up: a very muddy excavation in South Carolina.
References:
Boessenecker RW, Fordyce RE. 2015a. A new eomysticetid (Mammalia: Cetacea) from the late Oligocene of New Zealand and a re-evaluation of ‘Mauicetus’ waitakiensis. Papers in Palaeontology. 1:107–140.
Boessenecker RW, Fordyce RE. 2015b. A new genus and species of eomysticetid (Cetacea: Mysticeti) and a reinterpretation of “Mauicetus” lophocephalus Marples, 1956: transitional baleen whales from the upper Oligocene of New Zealand. Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society. 175:607–660.
Boessenecker RW, Fordyce RE. 2015c. Anatomy, feeding ecology, and ontogeny of a transitional baleen whale: a new genus and species of Eomysticetidae (Mammalia: Cetacea) from the Oligocene of New Zealand. PeerJ. 3:1–69.
Boessenecker RW and Fordyce RE. 2017. A new eomysticetid from the Oligocene Kokoamu Greensand of New Zealand and a review of the Eomysticetidae (Mammalia, Cetacea). Journal of Systematic Palaeontology.
Marples BJ. 1956. Cetotheres (Cetacea) from the Oligocene of New Zealand. Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London 126: 565–580.
Okazaki Y. 2012. A new mysticete from the upper Oligocene Ashiya Group, Kyushu, Japan, and its significance to mysticete evolution. Bulletin of the Kitakyushu Museum of Natural History and Human History Series A (Natural History). 10:129–152.
Sanders AE, Barnes LG. 2002. Paleontology of the Late Oligocene Ashley and Chandler Bridge Formations of South Carolina, 3: Eomysticetidae, a new family of primitive mysticetes (Mammalia: Cetacea). Smithsonian Contributions to Paleobiology. 93:313–356.
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