See the Ancient Whale Skull Recovered From a Virginia Swamp
Aug. 21, 2015 - What was a whale skull millions of years old doing in a Virginia swamp? Jason Osborne of PaleoQuest would like to find out. Osborne and a team of highly skilled divers went into the swamp to bring up the skull and try to piece together how it got there. Scientists know that the coast of the U.S. east of I-95 was under the ocean millions of years ago. But why it was such a hotbed for whales, sharks, and other marine species is still being studied.
Transcript
Jason Osborne
President and Co-Founder
Paleo Quest
When I first went to the site in the bottom of the river, you see these whale bones and and shark teeth just poking out.
The river is raging, it's like holding onto a car going 65 mile per hour down the highway.
Everything east of the Route 95 on the east side of the United States was underwater at one time. The seas receded, and what was left behind were ancient marine fossil deposits.
Around 2013 I actually pulled up some of the fossils, but there was a really large whale skull that I did not pull up.
James Murray
Co-Owner
Coral Edge Adventures
Tried to figure out how we were gonna dig it out, and how we would actually life something that is three to five hundred pounds, from the bottom of a river in black water and get it back up onto the boat.
Jason Osborne
Today we were able to pull up a 500 million-year-old skull, a baleen whale skull that's very very large.
Now that the skull is dried out a little bit I contacted Stephen Godfrey and he looked at the skull and he definitely confirmed that it was a baleen whale skull8 and we're looking at anywhere from 4.5 to 5.5 million years old.
The skull was around seven feet if it was complete, just based on the evidence that we had. So we're looking at a whale that's probably close to 40 feet in length and somewhere around 30 tons.
These were ancient shallow seas, and often calving areas for whales. So they become a great food source for large sharks like megalodon or very very large mako sharks. So a lot of the bones we find have lacerations or chomp marks from the large sharks.
You pull these fossils up and they tell a story, the bite marks and laceration marks, too. The size of the teeth and the type of sharks, they all tell a story. It's a huge puzzle and you're putting the pieces together.
And this piece would actually fit right in here.
