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Yesterday, a team from Museums Victoria and Barwon Coast successfully excavated a fossil from a beach in Ocean Grove, located on the Bellarine Peninsula.
The discovery was made by Dr. Erich Fitzgerald, a senior paleontologist at Museums Victoria, who located the fossil buried under about half a meter of sand. This was after the Davidson family tipped him off about the find.
“I was just about to start my Christmas leave when a member of the public contacted the museum’s enquiry line, claiming they had discovered something on the beach at Ocean Grove,” Fitzgerald explained.
He continued, “On December 19th, I decided to investigate. Sure enough, they had indeed found something significant.”
The Davidson family, visiting from Cooktown, stumbled upon the fossil during their holiday in December.
“I pretty much stumbled over it … we spent some time trying to dig it up and look at it and took some photos,” Kristina Davidson said.
”There’s the spine, there’s rib bones, it’s just kind of all there.”
Dozens of helpers raced against a rising tide today to dig away sand and chisel at the one-tonne sandstone block that cocooned the ancient vertebrae.
Heavy machinery was then brought in to move the giant fossil, which was imprinted on a one-tonne block of sandstone, from the beach.
From there it was loaded onto a truck and driven back to Melbourne, where paleontologists will study it.
They say it’s one of the biggest whale fossils ever found in Australia.
“Every fossil we find has its own unique significance … it’s rare to find a skeleton where there are many of the bones connected together,” Fitzgerald said.
“There’s one little tooth that we can see exposed on the side of this block, and that tooth suggests that this is from a really quite primitive group of toothed echo-locating whales.”
The fossil could give paleontologists a rare look into a black spot in the history of the mammal.
“These fossils and the rocks that house them at Ocean Grove are from a time in Earth’s history and the evolutionary story of whales, where we have very few fossils worldwide,” Fitzgerald said.
“It’s a critical episode where the Earth’s climate and oceans were changing really dramatically about 21, 23 million years ago.
“This fossil from Ocean Grove doesn’t just have local, state, national significance, it has the real chance to shed light on the global picture of whale evolution through what you might consider the missing years of whale history.”
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