I'm here with some fossil stories again... I hope I don't bore you guys
Yesterday I received an e-mail from an employee from the Royal Belgian Institute for Natural Sciences, the organisation behind the natural history museum of our capital, Bruxelles. He asked me if I would be willing to volounteer in a digging near the port of Antwerp. During some excavations for a housing project, some people stumbled upon some old human remains from the Palaeolithicum. Flint tools and so on. In Belgium, archeologists have the power to temporarily shut down any construction site if something of archeological value is found. Paleontologists do not. Now, long story short, during their excavation at the site, they dug a little deeper than required and they found rib fragments. They called the museum in Bruxelles and they got out there to check it out. Turned out that what the archaeologists had found was part of a fossil whale skeleton.
This discovery was made on Wednesday and the construction site has been shut down until the second of May, so the paleontologists from Bruxelles had the opportunity to join the dig, get that skeleton out asap and write an article on it.
That's somewhat where I came in; They could use the extra pair of hands to get the skeleton out in time, and if there would have been any remains of scavengers (sharks), they wanted me to help determine what would be found. Sadly, no sharkteeth were found and there were no bitemarks on any of the remains, so there was no shark activity on the corpse at that time.
So, here are some of the pics. The remains belonged to an animal that had a length of approx. 15 metres. The lower jaw and hearing bone was already taken away yesterday (most important for determining the species) so I don't have any pics of that since I joined the dig today. The animal was lying on his back, so the ribs were at the surface and dorsal vertebrae are probably stil underneath. Some tail vertebrae were discovered today.
Enjoy people
A picture from head (which is already gone) to tail (some parts of the tail are yet undiscovered):
Ribs:
Vertebrae:
Most likely the neural arch of a vertebrae (and my Victorinox Climber for the finer prepping, since the material was EXTREMELY brittle):
It was pretty much in people's backyard
, if only they would know...
I hope you guys like this!
Jerry
