A 16yearold student searched for fossils on her family farm Alabamain June when he found a whale skull estimated to be 34 million years old.
Lindsey Stallworth, a firstyear student at the Alabama School of Mathematics and Science, accompanied her science teacher Drew Gentry, went to the farm where her family grows trees for lumber in Monroe County. Her goal was to find more fossilized shark teeth, like the ones Lindsey took to her biology class last year.
They had been looking for fossils for hours when Gentry asked if Lindsey had seen small bone fragments on the hillside. Then they went to the top of a hill, where they found larger pieces and dug up more.
Lindsey Stallworth cleans whale skulls in the lab at the Alabama School of Mathematics and Science Photo: Alabama School of Mathematics and Science
Instead of shark teeth, students and teachers found a whale skull. Using information from the US Geological Survey and the Alabama Geological Survey, they were able to conclude that the skull is about 34 million years old. At that time, many whales swam in the seas that then covered most of southern Alabama.
“We found something much bigger than we wanted to find,” Gentry, 38, told The Washington Post.
“I stood there for two minutes looking at it and thought, ‘What did we really find?'” the teenager said. “I was very, very excited but also confused as it was my first experience in paleontology. “It’s really difficult to understand something that’s so many millions of years old, but it started to make more sense when we started removing the dirt and seeing what the skull looked like,” the student added.
Lindsey excavating the whale skull on her family farm Photo: Alabama School of Mathematics and Science
The skull is estimated to be from a 4.5 to 6meterlong whale and appears to be related to Basilosaurus cetoides, an ancient species of 15 to 18meterlong whale.