LAGUNA NIGUEL : Whale Fossil Moved to Saddleback College

A 5-million-year-old whale discovered last week during construction of a church parking structure was transported Thursday to Saddleback College, where students will restore it for display on campus, according to a paleontologist in charge of the excavation.

Peter Borella, a professor of geology at Saddleback and the paleontologist monitoring construction at St. Timothy’s Catholic Church on Crown Valley Parkway, said the college is working out an agreement with the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange to have the diocese donate the whale to the college and cover the cost of excavation.

The crowning glory of the fossil find, paleontologists said, is the whale’s intact nine-foot skull. Borella said after the skull, with surrounding rock, was encased in plaster it weighed two tons. A front loader was used to lift it from the church grounds onto a flatbed trailer.

The skull was transported about five miles on surface streets to Saddleback, where it was unloaded with a forklift and placed outside the math sciences building, where it will be ultimately displayed.

Borella said that two-thirds of the whale’s original skeleton, including most of its spinal column, was dug out of the earth and moved in pieces to the campus. He said restoration of the 35-foot leviathan skeleton will be a school project, with students of geology, paleontology and biology participating.