Success at Pina

Jacketed and ready to go!

We FINALLY recovered the skull from Pina up on the Caribbean side! It's really been an ongoing saga -- I remember first finding that thing all the way back in January. You may remember (but probably don't) that we were supposed to take the thing out last Friday. Well, we got up early that day and marched over to the labs as planned, only to find that our truck had been taken in for maintenance and that the only other available truck was so far on it's last leg that we were forbidden to even try taking it to the other side of the country and loading a huge rock into it. (You may also remember that one of our trucks, which happens to be the only other good one, broke down when we were coming back from the Azuero Peninsula.) From that Friday until today, every low tide was forecast for the early morning -- as in, pre-dawn early. So, when we finally made our way to Pina today (we still had to get up at 5:00...) we had our doubts about how solid the plaster jacket on the fossil would be. Or if it would even still be there at all. We were pleasantly surprised, then, when we found the thing in near-perfect condition. The plaster was just barely on the soft side in the very center (where it had been receiving the most sea-spray), but otherwise it was as if we had just made it earlier that day.

Without delay we set to popping the rock out of the cliff face. Since we had already created a nice, deep well in the previous visits, it was just a matter of putting a few chisels around the perimeter and driving them in towards the center to fracture the last remaining connection between our boulder and the wall it had once been a part of. Two people did the chiseling while another two held a homemade tarp-stretcher underneath to help break the fall onto the hard tidal flat. Despite feeling a little crowded with all of us standing on one another's feet, it actually worked pretty well. The boulder popped out with only a few well-placed chisels and we were more-or-less able to catch it with the tarp. The thing weighed a few hundred pounds, so we had no delusions about preventing it from hitting the ground entirely and were mostly just aiming for reducing the impact, which we were able to do. The only problem (something always to worry about when removing a fossil from a cliff face rather than from flat ground) was that some of the material extended even deeper into the wall than the trench we had carved out, so we had broken the fossil. Even worse, some of our chisel strokes had caused an additional fracture maybe half an inch behind the one that separated the boulder from the cliff, leaving a sheet of fossil + rock quite ready to pop off, which would almost certainly result in further breaks. We ended up carefully removing what bone fragments we safely could and left the rest for whoever might choose to study the skull and describe it. (It was nearly impossible to tell the orientation of the skull, so we were basically in there blind and decided there was too much risk to try extracting anything else.

The enamel is the little part pointing towards my wrist,
and the rest is all root.

Our imperfect extraction actually ended up helping us identify the specimen, since a tooth was left exposed after the boulder detached from the wall. This tooth was relatively small but had an extremely large root, something characteristic of a sperm whale. It's all about small victories sometimes. And although the day wasn't a perfect success, any time spent in beautiful Pina is time well spent and I thought we did pretty well with the skull, all things considered.

Bonus: sea slug hanging out in the shallows.