Once again the weather is about to truncate our excavation; rain is forecast for the next four days. Tim and I were joined this afternoon by Keith and Carter, and we managed to get a lot of sediment removed, and we also completed yesterday’s jacket containing a large part of a flipper.

What did we find behind that jacket? Another flipper! The bone shown above is a baleen whale humerus; this is not the same humerus that we jacketed yesterday. The two humeri are about the same size, and so it’s possible (but not yet definite) that they come from the same whale. Another phalange is visible just below the humerus, as well.

We removed the second humerus, and found a possible radius and scapula right beside it, as shown below. We also found the 19th vertebra in the series we’ve been excavating (it’s at the center of this photo, but is hard to see):

And one more goodie, a nearly complete posterior rib that had to be removed from a trench (photographed in the hotel bathtub to get a white background):

It’s supposed to start raining tonight. Tim and I are going to return to the quarry tomorrow to try to recover the rest of the exposed bones.

On Thursday, Tim and I removed and loaded exposed bones and shut down the site just in time; a driving rain started just as we were taking the tarps down. We should have this load of bones (about 500 lbs worth) back at the museum this weekend.

Tim also has some additional modern Carmel Church critters on his blog.