Gentry, a paleontologist, believes the whale may be a species previously unknown to scientists. He says the skull may belong to a whale that’s similar to, but smaller than, Alabama’s state fossil, a 50-to-60-foot prehistoric whale called the Basilosaurus cetoides. He believes the new discovery is more similar to the species zygorhiza, which has been unearthed in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana.
Millions of years ago Alabama was covered by ocean, and many residents regularly look for shark teeth and other ancient fossils; Stallworth, 16, has been finding fossils on the family farm since she was a kid. Taking Gentry’s biology class had encouraged her to expand her search for ancient marine life.
“My family mainly looks for different types of shark teeth, but we are realizing now there was a lot of stuff we’ve never recognized was there,” Stallworth told Good News Network. She had shown Gentry a bag of teeth she’d collected over the years. One tooth in particular caught his eye, and he asked if they could return to the area where she had discovered it.
Stallworth and Gentry spent a week excavating the skull with dental picks and other small hand tools until they uncovered most of the lower jaw. The two spent most of the summer extracting the skull and later transported it to a paleontology laboratory at their high school, the Alabama School of Math and Science in Mobile.
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“We don’t yet know if the entire skeleton is there, but the preservation is pretty fantastic,” Gentry told. “There are lots of different bones sort of protruding from the hill that we were digging in, so it’s likely more of the skeleton is present.”
Stallworth will continue her fossil work with Gentry during her junior and senior years.
“I already loved biology and I had originally wanted to be a marine biologist,” she said. “But this is more like marine paleontology because what we see is from the ocean.