| AUSTRALIA --
The skull of a 30-million-year-old whale
has been recovered in a rock in South Australia.
The whale fossil may be the oldest ever found
in Australia.
It was embedded in a sandstone boulder which
tumbled onto Port Willunga beach.
It had been found a month ago by retired palaeontologist
Neville Pledge and may take several months before it's freed
from the rock.
The boulder was taken to SA Museum where it
will be placed in a vat of acid to remove the skull from its
rocky tomb.
The ancestral toothed whale, a relative of modern
whales and dolphins, died and was fossilised on the ocean bed
about 30 million years ago, when the sea covered what is now
Adelaide.
When the seas retreated, the skeleton was trapped
in the sandstone cliffs of Port Willunga. Erosion eventually
took its toll and the boulder containing the skull toppled on
to the beach, reports The Advertiser.
Neville Pledge visited the beach in the hope
of finding fossil fragments and noticed the back of the skull
poking through the rock.
He commented: "I was hoping to find a vertebrae,
or something like that, I never imagined I would find a skull.
I was completely overwhelmed when I saw it."
Story filed: 01:12 Tuesday 6th November 2001
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