Surfers
in Northern California usually aren’t happy to see water levels dropping below
normal levels, but last week might be an exception, as an abnormally low tide
helped one group uncover a small, prehistoric skeleton at the base of a cliff
near Pleasure Point in Santa Cruz county.
According
to Joshua Gardner of ABC News, the surfers discovered a set of fossilized
vertebrae Thursday at “a rocky outcrop that is usually covered by water, even
at low tide.” One of them, identified by Gardner only as “Donkahones,” took a photograph of the approximately six to
eight foot set of bones and posted them online.
The
surfer initially believed that the fossils belonged to a dinosaur, but Gary
Griggs, director of the University of California, Santa Cruz Institute of Marine
Sciences, told ABC News that the vertebrae were most likely “from an
extinct whale species, probably one that looked a lot like whales today.”
Griggs
added that the fossils indicate that the creature was likely between 10 and 20
foot long and, that it most likely lived during the Pliocene era,
making the fossils approximately three to five million years old.
The
bones were found near the Pleasure Point home of surf legend Jack
O’Neill, KSBW.com‘s Amy Larson reported on Friday. O’Neill told
Jason Hoppin of the Santa Cruz Sentinel that he had lived at that
residence for more than four decades and had never seen the fossils prior to
last week.
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