A Cetacean rib excavation & sunset for the New Year

We discovered the fossilized rib of a cetacean and spent our time intently concentrating back and forth between the beautiful bone and a wonderful sunset.  The rib was extracted as a single intact unit.  The sun eluded our capture and dissappeared into the grasp of the Winter evening.

More Charcharodon photos

Here are a few more shots of the megalodon pictured below...

Charcharodon from Santa Cruz, 2 million years ago.

This was one of my more exciting discoveries from years past.

Whale Ears & Storm Chasers

Diane also found the first fossil of the day... a whale's tympanic bulla in a concretion...  A tympanic bulla is a bone found in the skull of cetaceans (whales, dolphins, & porpoises) that is involved in hearing through echolocation.  Because of the extreeme density of the bone (among the densest bones known in the animal kingdom) it preserves as a fossil well.  It has a distinctive "wrinkle" and a thin "lip" of bone.  It is characteristically egg-shaped and one can determine whether it came from the right or left side by cupping the lip between the thumb and index finger with the bulbous part down.  The one below is from the right side of the skull as the lip is on the right.

Nice periotic from yesterday...

Here's a very nice periotic, perhaps from the dolphin Parapontoporia, collected during one of the lowest tides of the year; the added storm created some nice memories... The periotic, like the tympanic bulla, is involved in hearing and echolocation in cetaceans.

Proximal cetacean jaw @capitola 12-4-10

This looks bigger due to the angular cross section...

Cetacean vertebra

Here's the shot just after Diane & I got the big whale vert off the beach at capitola around 9pm the day after thanksgiving.  We had to use the old bike carrier and wait for low tide but even then we got wet and were rock hopping with the carrier. The thing must have weighed 120 lbs.  It crossed my mind on more than one occasion that night that I'm getting too old for heavy work and then I checked in on the back story and reminded myself now that I'm 50 I have to start aging backwards from here on out.  49 here I come.