Experts Study Fossil of Prehistoric Whale : Remains Unearthed at Construction Site Near Nixon Mansion

Scientists examined the remains of a prehistoric whale unearthed at a San Clemente construction site to determine the significance of the find.

The bones, discovered in a rock formation estimated at 6 to 8 million years old, were unearthed last week by geologists monitoring the preparation of a construction site located a few miles from the seaside estate that served as President Richard M. Nixon’s Western White House.

The fossils are being excavated under the direction of Scientific Research in nearby Costa Mesa and will be turned over to a Southern California museum, according to Jim Slosson, a subcontractor developing the site with residential housing.

A geologist from Leighton & Associates who was at the site at the time of the discovery said she believes that scientists “found a portion of the whale bone that they don’t usually find. I think it was a flipper.”

Perhaps 30 Feet Long

She estimated that the whale was 30 feet long, but said “some of it might have been lost.”

The remains unearthed Wednesday do not appear to be either the oldest or largest fossils ever discovered in Orange County, an area rich in ancient marine finds, said Doris Walker, author of several books detailing finds in the Capistrano Formation on which Orange County sits.

At least a dozen “significant” discoveries have been made in the last decade, Walker said. “But it’s still a spectacular find because there is no place in the world where so many have been discovered,” she said.

The newly unearthed whale was located near the site of a dramatic 1980 discovery, Walker said.

“In that instance, the first intact fossil of a four-tusk walrus was found--the first ever in the world--in a grave site 30 feet down.”

Believed Baleen Whale

Although Walker and others are awaiting word from paleontologists on details of the newest find, she speculated that the fossil is of a baleen whale, which feeds through a kind of filter rather than with teeth.

California grays, the least evolved of whales, are baleen whales, Walker said. It is their ancestors that are being unearthed all along the Orange County coast.

“This Capistrano Bay area was once an inland sea. That is why our finds are so rich and so many. It’s also why there were no dinosaurs in Southern California,” she said.

“It was a sea. And Orange County is believed to have been the last part of California under water before the land was uplifted.”