Paleontologists find hoard of fossils, even a whale’s skeleton, near Va. quarry

Tapping with her pick, she heard the hollow sound that signaled she’d found a bone rather than a rock. She pointed to the selection of fossils already crowded around her knees, the product of that day’s digging.

“There’s a whale, a fish [skull] plate, and then some dolphin vertebrae over here,” she said.

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Alton Dooley has been digging for miocene-era whale fossils at the Martin Marietta Carmel Church quarry excavation site for about 20 years. One of the richest fossil beds on the east coast, especially for the miocene era, the dig yields an alternative spring break for Virginia college students, as well as hundreds of prehistoric whale and shark fossils.

Location of fossil dig site

Prolific days are not unusual at Carmel Church. Dooley enumerated the marine creatures he has identified since 1990: 17 species of whales and dolphins; 15 to 20 kinds of sharks; seals; sea turtles; 20 to 30 fish, including sunfish, tuna, drum and sturgeon; and crocodile. Some of the fossils are pressed together, overlapping, as if they had settled to the bottom on top of one another. Some have bite marks, evidence that the carcasses had been eaten by sharks or other scavengers.

The teams have also found land animals that Dooley believes were washed out to sea, including a camel, a tapir, a piglike mammal called a peccary and some extinct animals, including the dromomerycid, a deerlike creature with three horns, and a dog-size horse ancestor called Calippus.

Jawbones of a whale

The biggest find at Carmel Church was the nearly complete 30-foot whale skeleton that Dooley discovered in 1990. It took years of digging and preparation before he described — and named — Eobalaenoptera harrisoni, a previously unknown extinct baleen whale, in a scientific paper in 2004.

An impressive cast of the whale skeleton hangs in the atrium of the Caroline County Visitor Center in Ruther Glen, a few miles from the site.

Nicholas Pyenson, a curator at the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History, has studied similar “bone beds” on the West Coast, including Sharktooth Hill near Bakersfield, Calif., a formation that stretches for more than 30 miles and has the fossilized remains of tens of thousands of shells and marine animals.

“They’re formed when the bones are concentrated in one spot,” Pyenson said. “But many different things could be the cause. Maybe they all did die together. Maybe it is an environmental thing, like an ocean current or river channel. The riddle is how the concentration occurred.”

Bone beds along Maryland’s Calvert Cliffs extending from Chesapeake Beach to Drum Point have been providing fossil hunters with marine animals since the 1700s. But the concentration of prehistoric remnants isn’t as great as at Carmel Church.

The site is privately owned, but Martin Marrietta Materials allows Dooley and his team to work there.

“It’s an extraordinary site,” said Brian Beatty, a paleontologist at the New York College of Osteopathic Medicine, who has worked with Dooley in identifying some of the fossils. “Carmel Church has some really very good preservation of terrestrial animals as well as the whales. On the East Coast, Carmel Church is one of those rare places to find them.”

Beatty is a bone specialist. In 2009, he and Dooley determined that jawbones on a whale from Carmel Church were broken, indicating it may have been injured while feeding along the bottom. The injury was so great that infection set in and the animal probably died a painful death, according to their paper.

The two are now kicking around some ideas as to the geological puzzle of the site and why so many bones have landed here.

“We have some partial explanations,” Dooley said with a smile. “But I’ve gotten used to being wrong.”

Niiler is a freelance writer in Chevy Chase.