About a week ago on one of our walks, I saw a piece of bone sticking out of this little boulder. I took it home in a clay block, and cleaned it off and determined it was not a piece of spine or limb, but probably a piece of a skull of some sort. The next day I dug out two more pieces, and over a couple of days, I cleaned them off.
(The photo is from today, so the pieces are already missing. I dug around more today, but couldn't find any more bone.)
And this is what I got. I couldn't make much sense out of them, and I posted this picture to the
Facebook fossil board, and was told I should take it to the Calvert Marine Museum for identification. Also,
Paul Murdoch came over to gawk, and told me the same thing.
So, today, we made arrangements to go down to Solomon's and take our small box of bones to John Nance, the collections manager, who I know from other events. But first, we stopped at a harbor side restaurant, Anglers Seafood Bar and Grill for lunch and a beer and had it out side on the patio.
Afterwards we went to the museum, where we killed some time in the gift shop waiting for them to find John, who showed up with Stephan Godfrey, the Curator of Paleontology. They enthused over the bones, and dug out a cast of a Sperm Whale skull, and showed us how the bones fit together (we had it all wrong). They suggested it was probably an ancient Killer Whale sized dolphin, maybe matching the
large tooth that Georgia found a three years ago. We donated the bones to them, and they told us they would add it to their permanent collection.
The old
Drum Point Light House, which was moved from Drum Point to the museum in 1975.
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