Unearthed during a construction dig at the San Diego Zoo in California last Thursday: The fossilized remains of a 24-foot-long baleen whale that lived 3 million years ago.
The age of the find is remarkable, but what makes this even more rare is the fact that the entire skeleton appears to be more or less intact: head, vertebrae, flippers, and all.
As Discovery News notes, "Our genus, Homo, wasn't even around 3 million years ago, so this wasn't some sort of super prehistoric zoo. The site then, during the Pliocene, was under water."
Construction at the site will continue.
(Photo by Ken Bohn, courtesy San Diego Zoo)
