Whale of a Work in Progress Offers Glimpse to Past

The newest addition to Sea World’s family of whales is also the oldest--3 million years old, to be exact.

“Bony” is a nearly complete fossil of a young adult right whale that expired in shallow coastal waters over what is now Chula Vista.

A temporary exhibit of the fossil was unveiled Friday at the marine park. The display will last two or three months, while a team of paleontologists prepares and reconstructs the whale’s skeleton.

The exhibit is the brainchild of paleontologist Tom Demere, who manages the fossil collections at the San Diego Museum of Natural History.

“When you go to a museum, you see a skeleton all cleaned and fully mounted, and you lose that sense that it’s been buried for 3-million years,” Demere said.

This fossil is particularly interesting, he said, because it is the only one of its kind that has been found in California.

The skeleton was discovered during the grading of a portion of the Rancho del Rey housing development in Chula Vista, when earth-moving equipment chipped off a piece of it, Demere said.

The developers, McMillin Communities, offered to help fund the exhibit, in partnership with Sea World. The Museum of Natural History will provide the paleontologists. After the exhibit closes, the fossil will join many others unearthed at the Rancho del Rey site that are now in the museum’s collections.

“So many times we find ourselves wearing the black hat, being the land-raper,” said Ed Elliott, executive vice-president of development engineering for McMillin Communities. “We’re providing a free excavation for a guy like Tom, in order to build the American dream.”

Since grading on the development began in 1988, the team of consulting paleontologists headed by Demere has identified fossilized remains of “the largest sea cow that ever lived,” a previously unknown species of toothless walrus, and “the largest assemblage of fossil sea birds anywhere in the world,” Demere said.

And lots of other whales.

“We’ve been collecting different kinds of baleen whales,” Demere said. “We collected a fin whale yesterday, without a head.”

Baleen whales, which include the right whales, gray whales, and blue whales, have a sort of vertical strainer--the baleen--where killer whales have teeth.

Blue and gray whales trap schools of fish or bottom muck in their mouths and force the water out, Demere said. But right whales are “passive strainers--they’re constantly skimming” as they swim along with their mouths slightly open and water flowing out again through the baleen-- minus fish and krill.

“Bony” is missing his or her baleen, however, as well as the lower jaw and flippers.

But fortunately for paleontology, Bony’s carcass sank “en masse” before it was further dismembered, Demere said. It landed in what paleontologists now call the San Diego formation, a 100-foot-thick layer of sandstone deposited in shallow coastal waters that once covered Imperial Beach, National City, Chula Vista and part of San Diego.

Land animals prevalent during that time, some of whose remains are also deposited in eastern Chula Vista, included mastodons, horses, tapirs, giant camels, skunk, puma, and rabbits.