SCIENTISTS have extracted a 23-million-year-old whale fossil from a beach in Ocean Grove, Victoria, which is “one of the most complete whale skeletons ever found in Australia”. The team of 20 scientists and construction workers armed themselves with jackhammers, shovels, and an excavator, and set up a 25-metre exclusion zone,...
SCIENTISTS have extracted a 23-million-year-old whale fossil from a beach in Ocean Grove, Victoria, which is “one of the most complete whale skeletons ever found in Australia”.
The team of 20 scientists and construction workers armed themselves with jackhammers, shovels, and an excavator, and set up a 25-metre exclusion zone, The Age reported yesterday, in what was the most complicated effort to recover a whale fossil in the history of Australian science.
Half of the ancient creature’s spine was discovered, as were some ribs, some of one of its flippers, the back of the skull, and the tip of a tooth.
“This is the closest thing we get to genuine time travel until physicists build us a machine,” said Erich Fitzgerald, who led the dig.
The fossil was discovered by a local family in Dec.
