Week in Review : MAJOR EVENTS, IMAGES AND PEOPLE IN ORANGE COUNTY NEWS. : CITIES : Ancient Whale Fossils Dug Up in Dana Point

Construction workers at a residential development in Dana Point had a whale of a time when they unearthed two prehistoric whale skeletons within five feet of one another.

The larger one, found first, was a 30-foot-long, “remarkably complete” baleen. The bones of the second, 10 feet long, “do not appear to be part of the bigger whale found earlier,” said Lawrence Barnes, curator of marine fossils and head of the vertebrate paleontology at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History, where both creatures will be stored.

“Similar fossils are found in Orange County every two or three years,” Barnes said. “But not very often do we get them with all the different parts so close together, almost like a complete animal.”

Both sets of remains, believed to be more than 6 million years old, will be given a protective coating of plaster and wet newspaper and shipped to the museum. The bones were found by construction workers grading a plot of land for a housing tract known as Antigua at Monarch Beach.