Beneath the mammoth…lies the whale: Thomas Jefferson Law School finds yet more fossils
February 26, 2009 - 5:23 pm
That right there is the jaw bone from a Pleistocene whale that they just found at a constructions site in the East Village. As if finding a 500,000-year-old mammoth fossil in early February wasn’t enough, now the crew building a new Thomas Jefferson Law School campus managed to find whale bone located 40 feet beneath where the mammoth bones had been.
San Diego Natural History Museum paleontologist Tom Demere estimates that the whale may have been 40 feet long, based on the jaw bone, skull fragment, and ribs they found. See pics after the jump.
Margaret Carrino points out the whale’s scapula:
And right there we have a whale rib:
All pictures courtesy Thomas Jefferson Law School.
Advertisement
One Comment
leave one →
This is so cool! Although, I have to wonder: after finding two sets of fossils on site, are they going to have to dig those last 10 feet with a teaspoon?