A Columbian mammoth's remains were found at a construction site in San Diego three weeks ago bringing the construction of the Thomas Jefferson School of Law to a halt. The mammoth was likely to have died about 500,000 years ago. Scientists were called in to excavate the site.
Yesterday just 10 feet below the mammoth's bones, those of a prehistoric whale were discovered.
According to the scientists, these prehistoric whale bones could belong to an ancestor of the modern gray whale. It is thought to have died some 600,000 years ago and to have measured about 40 feet long.
The curator of paleontology at the San Diego Natural History Museum, Thomas Demere, explained that gray whales were part of the baleen group of whales that filter feed through baleen plates and, even though the bones unearthed so far, suggest that it could be an early ancestor of the gray whale, more bones need to be found to confirm this.
Unearthed so far are the whale's jaw, shoulder blade, neck bone and upper spine. The bones are spread across an area about 40 feet. Field paleontologist Pat Sena said that sea currents were no doubt responsible for spreading them around like that.
The mammoth and whale remains could provide clues to their evolutionary history and to global weather patterns in prehistoric times.
As Sena said:"When sea levels are in, it's a warmer climate. Polar ice caps are melting and sea levels are rising. We're looking at periods of global warming and global cooling in a real short package of time here."
Paleontologists, using hand axes, shovels, trowels and brushes to excavate the rest of the whale, expect to be on site for some time longer.
Information from: The San Diego Union-Tribune
I saw from a video that the construction site is a small area and 'experts' are intrigued as to why it is a bone bed. The bad science they did was to slap dates on the fossils before tests were done. They couched themselves on the trite maxim that the deeper the fossil, the older it is. If that is reliable, then the recently found tusk from the first mammoth found there is 10,000 years younger than its owner. So the keepers of the truth guess that a river deposited and buried the remains; do you know of any rivers that keep the same course for 100,000 years that have the magical power to preserve under the same conditions a whale and a mammoth directly above it? Its easier to believe a global flood or at least a mega-tsunami created this bone bed. In the area they also found remains of another mammoth, a horse, a giant sloth, and lots of sea shells. As the real news story emerges, the media retreats from it. Its hard to hide an elephant under a rug of bovine defecation.-Doug Gibson
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