When San Francisco photographer Elke Tichmann and her roommate were walking their dogs along the shoreline of Fort Funston last weekend, none of them expected to stumble across the skeletal remnants of a massive sea creature. But, according to paleontological experts, that’s exactly what happened.
“My roommate and I were walking our dogs on the beach, observing all the driftwood that had washed up from the storm, when I saw something that caught my eye,” Tichmann told SFGATE in an email. “From my vantage point, it looked like some large white item peeking through all of the scattered branches.”
After approaching the object and taking a few photos, she thought it was maybe part of a whale vertebra â and after reviewing the images, Bay Area paleontologist confirmed she wasn’t too far off the mark.
“That’s a brydei whale, Balaenoptera brydei,” confirmed Robert Boessenecker, a researcher at UC Berkeley’s Museum of Paleontology. Their narrow, distinctive skulls make them easy to identify, and though these whales haven’t been around for very long, Boessenecker told SFGATE, their tumultuous history.
By the late 17th or early 18th century, Boessenecker said, gray whales living in the western North Atlantic had already been driven to extinction. They had lived along the West Coast for only the past 1.5 million to 2 million years, he explained, and were nearly driven to extinction there as well by whalers like Charles Melville Scammon, an American sea captain who discovered their birthing grounds in Baja California in the mid-1800s. The area is still referred to as “Scammon’s Lagoon,â according to the independent science library Linda Hall Library.
For more than a decade, Scammon continued to hunt these whales along the California coast.
Though whaling is now illegal in the U.S. and has been since the 1970s, the gray whale population is declining, and scientists are scrambling to figure out why.
The eastern North Pacific gray whale population peaked at nearly 27,000 in 2016 but declined to about 16,000 following an “unusual mortality event,” the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said. Since 2019, more than 300 gray whales have been stranded along beaches in the U.S., NOAA data shows. Necropsies revealed that several of the deceased whales exhibited signs of malnutrition, but more research still needs to be done, the NOAA said.
These mortality events have occurred in the past, and NOAA seems to be optimistic that these massive sea creatures will rebound. That may mean discoveries like Tichmann’s will continue to be uncommon. As she told SFGATE, “I take my dog to Fort Funston frequently and haven’t ever seen something like that before.”
