Extract from ABC News
The whale fossil was found at Ocean Grove. (Supplied: Robert French/Museums Victoria)
In short:
A 21-million-year-old fossil has been safely removed from the beach at Ocean Grove, east of Geelong, in what has been described as one of the largest and most complicated excavations in Victorian history.
The fossil is of a toothed whale but the species is yet to be confirmed.
What's next?
Palaeontologists at Museums Victoria will now study the fossil in the hope of discovering more about the evolution of whales and oceans.
An "extremely rare" 21-million-year-old whale fossil found along Victoria's Bellarine Peninsula could hold some answers about the evolutionary history of the species.
Senior palaeontologist at Museums Victoria Research Institute Eric Fitzgerald said he first travelled to Ocean Grove in December last year after a member of the public sent an email saying they thought they had found something.
"We got out in the field, the weather was great and the fossil was monumental," Dr Fitzgerald said.
"It's very rare to find fossils where you still have the bones of the skeleton connected together."
The extraction of the fossil has been described as the most complicated operation to be carried out in Victoria. (Supplied: Robert French/Museums Victoria)
Months of meticulous planning followed to safely extract the fossil from the sand.
"This fossil was in an extremely challenging circumstance," Dr Fitzgerald said.
"It was buried under about half a metre of sand in the middle of a very large beach, which is heavily accessed, easily accessible, and the real question was, how on earth are we going to find this fossil again when it's covered up in sand?"
His team developed what he called a "creative system" using GPS, markers and memory to pinpoint its location before seeking relevant approvals from the traditional owners and Barwon Coast to extract the fossil.
Dawn mission to extract fossil
Earlier this week, a team of about 20 people gathered on the beach before dawn to perform the delicate operation of removing the fossil.
"They look pretty solid but it's essentially bone turned to stone," Dr Fitzgerald said.
"They can be quite brittle so we had to use as much care as possible."
Erich Fitzgerald says it was a race against the tide to extract the fossil. (Supplied: Robert French/Museums Victoria)
He said it took some time to locate the fossil under the sand and extract it before the tide returned.
"There were some real hairy moments," he said.
"I was looking at my clock, I was looking at the worried faces of the excavator operators, I thought it's now or never."
The group tried to use power tools to chisel the block from the ground but failed, before an excavator was brought in.
Dr Fitzgerald praised the operator as "an absolute legend".
"He shifted it as though it was a newborn child, the delicacy with which he operated that heavy machinery and a 1-tonne block of sandstone … was one of the most marvellous things I've ever seen in my life," he said.
Eventually, it was brought to safety and loaded into a truck to travel to the museum.
Dr Fitzgerald said it was the most logistically demanding, complicated and large-scale palaeontological field work of its kind ever undertaken in the state of Victoria.
The whale fossil is now at the Museums Victoria Research Institute. (ABC News)
A 'portal back in time'
Dr Fitzgerald said investigations would now turn to identifying the species of the whale, how old it was when it died, and what the 21-million-year-old fossil could reveal about the history of whales and the earth's oceans.
"That's from a really important but poorly known episode in the evolutionary history of whales on earth," he said.
"At that time, we know that the modern groups of whale and dolphins were just starting to emerge at a really tumultuous time in Earth's climatic and ocean history.
"Fossils from that time are extremely rare worldwide and Ocean Grove is amazingly one of the very few portals back in time to that episode in Earth's history where we get the chance to see what the whales were like, how they were hanging as Earth's climate was changing."
Erich Fitzgerald says the fossil could provide answers about the evolution of whales. (ABC News)
Dr Fitzgerald said at that time, Victoria's coastline was much further south.
"Australia, as it is today, is still drifting north due to plate tectonics and the southern coast of Australia was sitting at a latitude that today is further south than the southern tip of New Zealand," he said.
"Antarctica had become isolated. It had started refrigerating and freezing at that time and, in the oceans, there was this explosion of productivity — plankton, squid, fishes and the evolution of whales, dolphins, penguins were responding to that."
He said 3D scans would be carried out, then scientists would chip into the sandstone grain by grain to separate the bones.
"It feels very important to be part of this really groundbreaking discovery because research into fossilised whales in Australia is really in its infancy," he said.
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