NickPyenson

Oh, that makes sense. You've found a ~14-11 million year old fossil whale vertebra! The seacliffs along the coast of Calvert County have been a source of marine mammal fossils for over 100 yrs! At the Smithsonian, we have a terrific collection, but so does the Calvert Marine Museum in Solomons, Maryland. Go visit them!

Whoa! That is a whale vertebra! Probably belongs to a baleen whale. It looks like its fossilized. Where did you find it?

Oh, we love Dr. Scott. He's a real paleontologist! He has worked extensively on describing new dinosaur species (and a long-time collaborator with other Smithsonian scientists). He's now chief curator at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, and he's also host of Dinosaur Train! (My 4 yr old loves the show). Dinosaur Train rocks: they absolutely nail the science, and use a lot of hot stories in paleontology. I just wish they would take a Time Tunnel to the Miocene! We need more seacowbell. Gotta have more seacowbell.

Oh, and of course, something near to my heart: walrus whales. We found one of these guys at Cerro Ballena, reported in the paper we just published on the site -- it's the first discovery of it outside of Peru and it's the oldest one found so far.

What are they? They're a completely extinct kind of dolphin -- one that's trying really hard to look like a walrus. They looked something like a dolphin from the neck down, but with an Admiral Ackbar-type face for a business end. It's basically a dolphin trying very hard to be a walrus. (Algal blooms -- it's a trap!). Walrus whales were a bit different from walruses in that they had asymmetrical tusks.

Here's something fun: go over to http://3d.si.edu and take a tour of the type specimen of this species! My co-authors and long-time collaborators, the laser cowboys, helped scan in this 3D model, as part of their Smithsonian X 3D initiative.

http://3d.si.edu/explorer?s=gXsgwl

There isn't one. There are dozens, hundreds of thousands, really. And they're in museum collections around the world. Here's one of my long-time favorites (a shark, not a whale), but from the national collections at the Smithsonian -- Helicoprion:

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/running-ponies/2013/02/27/prehistoric-ghost-shark-helicoprions-spiral-toothed-jaw-explained/