Whale Hunt Saves A Prehistoric Resource -- Burke Museum Scientists Recover Fossil From Quarry

When Peter Ward of the Burke Museum learned last week that the fossil of a 30 million-year-old whale had been found in the Olympic Peninsula, it didn't take him long to decide that he wanted it.

Ward knew instantly the whale was a significant scientific find. While much was known about whales of earlier and later periods, there was relatively little known of whales of this age, the Oligocene period. Each new whale found has been of a new genus or species.

The find also could fill a gaping hole in the Burke collection. Fossil whales have been found in the state for years, but all have ended up in museums out of state, and not one from the Oligocene period had ever been mounted. The Burke, with its limited space, staff and money, has had to watch as the fossil whales found in its own back yard were taken to museums better equipped to study them.

Ward, appointed head of the Burke's geology and paleontology department six months ago, decided this whale would stay home.

"There are many places out there where you can find dinosaurs," Ward said. "But only in the state of Washington can you find whales of the quality and abundance that we have. This is our greatest fossil resource."

But to bring the fossil back to the Burke, at the University of Washington, Ward and his small crew found that they first had to save it - even risking its destruction.

John Cornish, an amateur paleontologist from Port Angeles, found the bones July 30 while picking through a quarry near Pysht, Clallam County, about 35 miles west of Port Angeles. He liked to wander through the pit on his way home, looking for shells and snails.

On that Friday, he spotted bones. He recognized that they were from a whale, most likely the jaw.

He called up Jim Goedert, who, with his wife, Gail, has been finding whale bones up and down the Olympic Peninsula for years. The Gig Harbor couple drove up the next day and found that the machinery had pulled up other skull bits. They collected those and called the Burke Museum.

Last Wednesday morning, Ward headed out with Bruce Crowley, a graduate student, and Ward's 9-year-old son, Nicholas. The two men brought with them the tools of their trade: hammers, large cold-steel chisels, five-pound sledgehammers, big steel crowbars and, for more fragile materials, dental picks.

Ward intended to stay only long enough to assess the situation. If the bones were as good as they were reported, he planned to organize an expedition. Done properly, the work of getting out whale bones often takes as long as three to four weeks.

But what they found was a pit being actively mined. There were at least five Caterpillar tractors ripping into the rocks for limestone, to be barged to Seattle. At the heart of the quarry were the bones.

Ward knew that what nature had hidden for 30 million years had to be completely recovered in a matter of days.

Race against the Caterpillars

The first bones were easy enough to find. Fragments had been scattered when a tractor had run over the the bones. When the three enormous iron teeth of the ripper head dug into the earth, it plowed right through the skeleton and sheared off part of it. Locals had scavenged some of the bones. A trophy hunter had carried off parts of the jaw, Ward said.

Fearing that more of the bones would disappear, Ward decided to stay, setting up tents right in the quarry. He called his boss, Burke director Karl Hutterer, and asked for assistance.

Until the sun set, Ward and Crowley chiseled out as much of the whale skull as they could find.

As they worked, they pieced together information about the whale. It was about 20 feet long, and it was clear from the way the bones were scattered that it had been scavenged after it died. But with so many of the bones there, they also knew they had an excellent specimen.

They knew the whale was from the Oligocene era, 25 million to 38 million years ago, because the rocks in that area are known by natural scientists to be about 30 million years old.

For those who study the evolution of whales, the Oligocene era is a mystery. Although there is a good record of whales in the Eocene period, which came before, and the Miocene, which came after, there is relatively little from the Oligocene.

"What's exciting about the whales from the Oligocene period is that they're truly transitional," said Lawrence G. Barnes, curator and head of the vertebrate paleontology section of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. "Through them we get to document missing links."

The whales of the period had hind legs and big front legs lightly developed into flippers. The baleen whales still had teeth. These features were all remnants of the earliest whales that left land, Barnes said.

"This is the start of the evolution of the great whales," Ward said. "This guy may be the ancestor of all the great baleen whales around."

A tropical world

In the evenings, as Ward and Crowley rested in their tents in the quarry, Ward told his son stories about what the world would have been like when the whale was living.

It would have been a warmer place, more tropical. The seas extended inland as far as the Cascades, which were then a young mountain range. The tall peaks, including Mount Rainier, had yet to form.

The whale was most likely an adult. After its carcass sank to the bottom of the sea, it was scavenged by parasitical creatures. Numerous fossilized shells were found near the whale fossil. A giant shark of the era is believed to have made away with the whale's tail: a shark's tooth was imbedded in one of the rib bones.

Taking a gamble

On Thursday, the Burke crew had grown by two more men, graduate students called in for reinforcement.

They continued to work on their island of encased whale bones as five Caterpillar tractors ripped into the rocks around them. It was becoming increasingly clear that they were in the way of the work.

But by afternoon they had gathered all they could with the equipment they had. From the way the bones were laid out, it was clear some were probably beneath a three-foot slab of rock.

"My first thought was that we would never get it out," Ward said. "It's too big and too deep. There was no way with our tools to get the rock cover out."

The only possible option risked destroying the bones.

After consulting with Crowley, Ward made his decision: He would take the gamble and use a Caterpillar to reach the bones.

"It was either do this and bust the bones, or walk away and the Caterpillars would get it and eat it up," Ward said. "In that sense it was an easy decision."

Under the rock, as they suspected, were the last of the bones they would find. By evening, those had been loaded into the crew's vehicles and taken back in Seattle.

In time, Ward hopes the whale will be the backbone of a museum of natural history. He also dreams of a museum devoted entirely to the study of ancient and modern whales. "When you reconstruct a fossil whale," he said, "it is equivalent to a dinosaur skeleton in the sense of wonder and awe it gives you."

Getting the whale fossils cleaned and mounted, however, would take at least a year and cost about $25,000 - money the Burke doesn't have. But if Ward succeeds in doing so, the fossil whale would be the only one ever mounted from the Oligocene era.

"Now comes the hard work," Ward said, "putting it all together."