Ancient fossil whale find kept in Oamaru backyard

Research assistants Marcus Richards and Sophie White sift through the fossils. Photo / Hamish Maclean

A suspected 20-million-year-old fossil whale, that for the past 12 years has been lying in an Oamaru backyard, could now help answer questions about a "dark age".

Former North Otago Museum director Bruce McCulloch has enjoyed fossicking at local beaches for the past 25 years.

In November 2007, his son Murray, now 32, came across the fossilised whale skeleton on a beach south of Cape Wanbrow.

"We knew it was a whale, it was pretty obvious — and it was a huge number of vertebrae just stretched out along the sand. It's not going to be anything else but a whale, it's just too big," McCulloch said.

A roughly 8m whale skeleton to be extracted from the sandstone. Photo / Hamish Maclean

They called Professor Ewan Fordyce, a palaeontologist at the University of Otago geology department, and agreed the family would store the fossils at home for the time being.

It took the family about "four or five hours" to recover the fossils.

Last week McCulloch was "delighted" when Fordyce's research assistants arrived at his home to transport the fossils to the university.

Late last year Fordyce was granted $928,000 for a Marsden Fund project dubbed "Fossils of Zealandia elucidate a global 'dark age' in whale evolution". He said if the fossils were in fact the bones of an animal from 20- to 23-million years ago it would also "quite likely" represent a newly discovered species — but the work to confirm that had only just begun.

Marcus Richards holding a fossilised whale vertebra. Photo / Hamish Maclean

The so-called dark age was an "obvious gap" in the fossil record of whales and dolphins through much of the world — and one of the hypotheses of the research he was now undertaking was that something crucial in the evolutionary process of modern cetaceans happened during that time.

"We are pretty sure that, especially with New Zealand fossils, we can resolve some of the issues of the dark age."