You never know what you will find in a landfill. Paleontologist Melissa Macias was looking for fossils in the Bowerman Landfill in Irvine, California, when she spotted teeth and bones as a construction crew moved soil to create a new waste disposal area. They turned out to be 18 teeth, a flipper bone and portions of the jaw and skull of a sperm whale, all well preserved. The fossils are believed to be 10-12 million years old.
Macias says that she was lucky to have spotted the fossils. “Three feet one direction it would have been taken out before I found it. Three feet to the other direction, it would have stayed buried,” she said.
SPERM WHALE FOSSILS UP TO 12 MILLION YEARS OLD FOUND IN IRVINE LANDFILL
Thanks to Irwin Bryan for contributing to this post.
They found them there before, I remember reading about it back in 1999-2000.
Written in 1995:
Twenty-two years later, in 1976, the complete fossil skeleton of a baleen whale was uncovered in Lompoc, California, in a bed of diatomaceous earth along with a small seal, other small whales, fish and birds.
From this fossil whale and other fossils, Mr. Ginenthal concluded:
The evidence of marine animals that has been found could only be created by immense, recent, oceanic tidal waves. If the floods across North America were caused by ice-domed lakes, they would have washed away all evidence of these whale bones and other marine materials; none of the floods would reach Mexico or the Bahamas.
Similarly, Jeff Dejong (enigma@reg.triumf.ca), on Jul 21, 1995, wrote:
Lets see, a world wide flood. Would a layer of silt which surround the earth constitute proof by any chance, or how about whales which have been discovered running perpendicular to the geological layers. Running through say 50 million years of strata! This suggest that the layers of geological time where layed down fairly quick.
And in May of 1995 Mr. D. W. Leon (dwleon@aol.com) wrote:
How do you explain whale skeletons found in a vertical position in diatomaceous earth (evolution cannot explain it, because for the diatoms to drop out of the water and engulf a whale would be a singular, rapid event of cataclysmic proportions).
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/polystrate/whale.html
The link you provided has the answer to the question.
“Had anybody taken the time and trouble to check the facts, they would have found that the story by Russel (1976) took some liberty with the facts and lacked very important information. First, the skeleton was not found in a vertical position, but was lying at an angle 50 to 40 degrees from horizontal. Finally, although at this angle, the whale skeleton lay parallel to the bedding of strata which at one time was the sea floor on which the dead whale fell after its death. These facts were confirmed by inquiring with the people at the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History who excavated the whale. Although nothing had been published on the whale, Russel (1976) clearly identified the staff who excavated the skeleton and they could have been easily called at the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History in Los Angeles, California.”
“It appears the creationists repeating this whale-of-a-tale, (including the editors of Creation Ex Nihilo) either failed to check their facts or didn’t want a good story to be ruined by the facts. In either case, none of these people apparently took the time and trouble to find out what the facts were before putting pen to paper. What they claim to be God’s truth is nothing more than an urban folktale used to validate personal religious beliefs.
What was found to be most disturbing was the tendency for creationists to deliberately omit specific locational data and references. Thus, they made it as difficult as possible for a person to independently confirm the data on which they offered as proof of a Biblical world-wide flood. As a result, only someone who had come across Corliss (1980) and Mr. Ginenthal’s article could track down Russel (1976) and by comparing descriptions of this fossil whale to Anonymous (1988) and other places where it was used evidence by creationists determine the source of the claims about a 80-ft fossil whale having been found in California buried in a vertical position. It almost seems that the people making the claims about this whale being evidence for a catastrophic or Noachian Flood wanted the reader take their claims taken as a matter of faith as being true and make it impossible for anybody to check the veracity of the story. This is propaganda, not science in the form of paragraph- to page-size versions of media sound-bites.”