By Sarah Boessenecker (@tetrameryx)
Happy Fossil Friday!
Fossils don’t prepare themselves, and rarely come out of the ground looking the way you seem them on display in a museum. Here at the CCNHM, we are building a team of dedicated, hard-working volunteer preparators to help us clear out our backlog of fossil cetaceans!
Fossil preparation takes time, skill, patience, and a certain eagerness. Cleaning off a fossil is a rewarding experience – you’re the first to see this bone surface in millions of years!
We currently have 2 amazing student volunteers; Jordy Taylor is a masters student in the Biology department, working with fossil sharks, and Brad Thompson is an undergrad in the geology department and museum docent.
Using brushes, dental picks, and some hard work, they’re helping us to expose whale and dolphin skulls from the Oligocene of the Charleston area.
Brad’s fossil is a braincase of a medium sized baleen whale from the upper Oligocene (~28 Ma) Chandler Bridge Formation of Summerville, South Carolina – a baleen whale in the family Eomysticetidae, the earliest toothless baleen whales.
Jordy is working on several waipatiid dolphin skulls – two nearly complete skulls in sandstone blocks, and a third fragmentary skull consisting of fragments of a partial braincase.
At least one of these skulls appears to represent the same species as the tusked waipatiid dolphin on display in our whale evolution gallery. Waipatiid dolphins were originally reported from the Oligocene of New Zealand – the first named species is Waipatia maerewhenua, named by R. Ewan Fordyce in 1994.
These dolphins were also common in the Oligocene seas near Charleston, and by preparing these skulls they are helping us to better understand their evolution. A big huge thank-you to our wonderful volunteers!