Stratford Hall: A Whale of a Find

Washingtonpost:

From the banks of the Potomac River, in a region steeped in American history, a massive fossil was dug up last month that apparently can be traced back to a time long before this country’s recorded history, a time deep in the world’s prehistory.

The fossil is the skull of a whale that is “approximately 15 million years old,” said John Nance, the paleontology collections manager at the Calvert Marine Museum in Southern Maryland.

The skull is about six-feet long and is believed to weigh about 1,000 pounds. It was excavated in July from the cliffs at the edge of the Potomac on the grounds of Stratford Hall, the home of Virginia’s Lee family and the birthplace of Robert E. Lee.

The rest of the skeleton, which experts believe belongs to a type of baleen whale that has since gone extinct, remains embedded in Stratford Hall’s sand-colored cliffs.

Stratford Hall is in Westmoreland County, and both George Washington and the country’s fifth president, James Monroe, were born in the county on the Northern Neck, about 100 miles southeast of Washington.

The eroding river bank where the fossil was found is one of the world’s few Miocene cliffs, said Jim Schepmoes, Stratford’s spokesman, referring to the geological epoch 5 million to 23 million years ago.

Thousands of shark teeth have been found there, and the area is known to be rich in marine fossils. Whales are relatively common in the area, so the rogue bone has been found in the past.

My parents moved to the Northern Neck when I was in college.  My friends and I would go out to what we called Shark Tooth Island.  You  could reach down and just grab up handfuls of shark teeth.  It was also a great place to party.  (as an aside)

How could that baleen whale have gone undetected all of these years?  What makes this story even weirder to me is that I think I know the guy who first spotted it.  I worked with him about 20 years ago.

Further reading:

Stratford Hall