Ancient whale fall from California's Año Nuevo Island one of youngest, most complete known

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A reconstruction of the fossil whale from Ao Nuevo Island with a scuba diver for scale. Below the silhouettes the bones of the fossil whale skeleton are shown as they were found in 1987. Black arrows point to places where fossil deep-sea mollusks wer ...
A reconstruction of the fossil whale from Año Nuevo Island, with a scuba diver for scale. Below the silhouettes, the bones of the fossil whale skeleton are shown as they were found in 1987. Black arrows point to places where fossil deep-sea mollusks were discovered. (Nick Pyenson/UC Berkeley)

A fossilized whale skeleton excavated 20 years ago amid the stench and noise of a seabird and elephant seal rookery on California's Año Nuevo Island turns out to be the youngest example on the Pacific coast of a fossil whale fall and the first in California, according to University of California, Berkeley, paleontologists.


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