A whale fossil, possibly 4-million-years-old, was unearthed at a housing construction site in Scotts Valley, Santa Cruz County, Calif. The fossilized bones were found on Sept. 4, according to Santa Cruz Sentinel.
The construction site was identified as having a high potential for fossil finds, so the project enlisted the help of archaeological consulting service Paleo Solutions. Two paleontologists and one archaeologist extracted the fossil on Thursday.
To keep the fossil safe during transport, scientists encased it in plaster. It will be brought to Paleo Solutions, where the bones will be removed from the rock. The process might not prove to be easy, especially if the bone is softer than the rock.
"It's hard to chip through the rock without breaking the softer bones, but we'll get it," paleontologist Scott Armstrong said.
The fossil was 25-feet-long and was relatively intact with parts of the skull, jaw, arm bones, shoulder blades and vertebrae. Armstrong said the bones belong to a mysticete whale, a predecessor of the baleen whale, and are estimated to be 4-million-years-old.
University of California-Santa Cruz paleontologist Matthew Clapham said the intact whale fossil was "an impressive find," unlike most fossils unearthed near California shores, which only have some bones or portions of the skull, Santa Cruz Sentinel reports.
"That's an interesting time in whale evolution," Clapham told Christian Science Monitor. "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."
