A small pick and a trowel are set aside as volunteers from the North America Research Group use jack-hammers and other power tools to excavate a fossilized whale skull in Empire on Oct. 18. The group of more than 20 people, primarily from the Portland area, worked between the tides to dig out the skull and, eventually, pack it in plaster for transportation to a lab for further work. World Photo by Susan Chambers

COOS BAY — It rained. It poured. It blew.

Intermixed, there was sun. Warm sun.

It was nice day for a whale excavation.

“We have a Miocene whale. It’s about 12 million years old. Three foot wide, 8 foot long,” said Andrew Bland.

The excavation project leader toiled next to 12 other amateur fossil hunters on the slippery crust of earth. Some cut down into rock-solid sandstone with muscle-pounding air hammers. Others shoveled up the chunks into buckets for fellow NARG members to heave away.

No, these folks weren’t pirates, but members of the North America Research Group, a band of amateur fossil hunters on a public service mission.

“Our primary mission is collecting fossils and using those fossils to educate the public,” he said.

And that science may make a deeper mark in history than any of them ever expected when they agreed to travel to Coos Bay to recover the almost 3-ton chunk of rock.

“It may be a new genus of whale based on some photos we’ve sent to a marine mammal expert,” Bland said. “That’s why it’s important to get it out before it erodes any further.”

For the love of science

Clad in bright yellow, orange, purple or green rain gear, the fossil hunters dug and dug and dug and dug through one of the worst October storms in the last decade on the Southern Oregon Coast. Their enthusiasm never waned during the mid-month week, even as the rain total for this day, Oct. 18, climbed to more than an inch. Wind gusted to more than 60 miles per hour.

“We’re in it for the science,” Bland said.

The whale excavators estimate the skull dates to either the late Miocene or early Pliocene epochs. The best guess is that it’s from a species that swam the ancient ocean from 4 million to maybe 12 million years ago.

“It is certainly the only late Miocene/early Pliocene whale skull of that size from the Pacific Northwest,” according to amateur paleontologist James L. Goedert, with the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture in Seattle.

Chances are good it’s a new genus and species. The find also is important because a private group was able to get the permits and do the work with private funding.

“Several major museums (the Burke included) were told about this fossil, but none of them had the interest, time, or funding to go and save it,” he said.

It’s a Mysticete or baleen whale — a filter feeder like modern-day gray whales.

“We won’t know for sure exactly what kind of Mysticete until it is cleaned and we can see more of it, particularly the snout, if it was preserved,” he said.

Then, scientists can compare it with similarly aged fossils from elsewhere in the world, especially California, Peru, Japan and Europe.

“For now, there is nothing like it as a fossil from north of Coos Bay,” he added.

In the late Miocene, continents crashed. Oceans developed currents similar to those today. It was a time of great climate change, but on a millions-of-years scale. Moving into the Pliocene the climate cooled, particularly north of the equator. Polar caps turned to ice.

“Unfortunately, there aren’t any volcanic units in here, which we can radiometrically date, so we have to go on a relative time scale rather than an absolute time,” said Robert Rosé, a NARG member from Sweet Home.

Rosé is a scientist. Tall and thin, the retired geologist happily breaks the technical points into friendly conversation.

“A million years here or there is not a big deal,” he said, taking a break to shake off the strain of digging in stone.

History repeats itself

The fossil was embedded in sandstone to be precise, but it was muddy sandstone, Rosé explained. It appeared that fossilized woody debris bumped up against the skull over what seems an eternity ago.

“There’s also a lot of invertebrate fossils, snails and clams, gastropods and pelecypods,” he said.

Evidence points to the whale washing up dead on the shore and then breaking apart. Think about how whales die today. The flesh is gone and the bones are left behind.

“They disarticulate, come apart very rapidly, so the one thing that’s going to hang around is the skull, because it’s so big,” Rosé explained. “It gets packed with sand and so it just stays there.”

But the vertebrae and all the flipper bones, they go everywhere. This whale’s remains are just an older version of what we see today.

The rock shelf that held the whale skull is known as the Empire formation. The scientists who made that designation decades ago were no-nonsense guys, naming it after the nearby city. There has been a lot of tectonic action around the Empire formation, with faults and a big, constant push from the sea. The layers below ground are folded, then there was erosion and layers folded again, but without volcanic evidence for dating.

The whale skull likely became exposed through erosion. Landside neighbors, who pulled on mud boots and raingear to meander out to keep watch over the crew, said the skull had been exposed for at least five years. And more and more the ravages of surf, wind, rain and sun had cut toward fossilized bone.

“I think humans have harmed it more than weather,” Rosé said.

“They come along and say, ‘Oh look ... a bone.” And they try and whack a piece off and they say, “Whoa, I’ve got a whale bone,’” he said.

Neighbors and group members who had checked on the fossil from time to time noticed some of the back end around the eye sockets had been broken off within the past year. Even so, they said, the skull is in very good condition. Erosion, weather and whackers hadn’t really harmed it.

But more weather was to come. More rain. Wind and salty spray. And bucket after bucket of fist-sized chunks of rock chipped from the edges of the whale fossil.

“I am tireless. I keep smiling and they just keep working,” said Trish Reading, a NARG member who ventured south from Beaverton.

Digging in the dark

By 7 p.m. on Thursday, it was a downpour. The rain threatened to fill in the dug-out area around the skull as quickly as the diggers pumped it out.

They stretched a blue canopy over the main part of the whale skull to keep the fossil as dry as possible, while Bland and the others applied plaster.

“It’s like a plaster cast,” group member Dan O’Loughlin said.

It’s designed to keep the fossilized skull stable. And in this case, it was crucial. The crew was worried. A fault line appeared as a small crack down the length of the skull. It wouldn’t take much effort — even the weight and pressure of the rock surrounding the fossil — to turn one whole fossil into two chunks.

More wind and sideways-blowing rain.

Some members were designated canopy holder-downers, each grasping a corner pole. Others — Andrew and Steven Bland, Bill Sullivan, Rosé — were intent on cleaning the exposed skull of salt water and grit and prepping the skull for toilet paper and plaster.

“Pretty much anyone who uses a bathroom can do this work,” one NARG member commented out of the dark.

The others laughed, but continued grabbing handfuls of toilet tissue and molding them to the protruding bones.

The toilet paper protects the bones, Bland said, while also preventing the plaster from sticking to the old skull.

It wasn’t long before the elongated “X” that formed the apex of the skull, with eye sockets on either side and the blowhole toward the front, was covered with white plaster. The triangular skull then looked more like a ghostly alligator head than a whale fossil.

It was time to call it a night.

Easy does it

Sunday morning dawned bright and calm, but for the high level of excitement at the beach.

Several fossil hunters finished bracing the skull in the rock. It was resting on only a thin sliver of a rock pedestal, ready to be lifted.

Friends and neighbors gathered. Oregon Institute of Marine Biology professors and students, cameras in hand, hiked onto the point to get a look at the piece of rock.

Bland, Sullivan, Tim Fisher and Rosé stood ready with two 8-foot-long 4-by-4s and some shorter pieces of 2-by-4s to brace the fossil and lift it out of its pit.

Slowly, a huge excavator chugged down the beach and settled into place with its bucket tipped under like a huge claw. They laced yellow lifting straps around each end of the skull and through hooks on the bucket.

Then slowly, the excavator began to lift.

The skull rocked to one side.

Then the other.

It was loose.

There was a collective inhale. Onlookers held their breath, waiting to see if the straps and braces would hold.

Crack!

It was a 4-by-4, but the skull stayed in one piece.

NARG members quickly moved it out of the hole and settled it on a nearby slab of sandstone to re-brace and ready for its trip down the beach.

Rosé stood back and watched.

“The thing is — it’s just a lot of hard work,” he said.

But it paid off.

More than two hours later, the excavator made its trek down the beach with the skull hanging off the bucket while two volunteers held ropes to either side to keep the fossil from swaying too much.

Where it will go

The skeleton was taken to a heated storage unit where Bland and other NARG members will begin peeling away the rock. The effort will move down to the scale of using dental picks. They’ll apply a glue to penetrate and preserve the specimen. Then the plans are to send the skull for identification to an amateur paleontologist at the The Burke Museum at the University of Washington. From there, NARG members want the skull fossil on permanent display at the Thomas Condon State Museum of Fossils at the University of Oregon.

For NARG, this was a massive undertaking. This is the largest fossil members have removed. But for Rosé each fossil holds the same allure.

“Every time you expose a piece of bone, you’re the first human being that’s ever seen that bone,” he said. “That get’s your blood up.”