SEATTLE — From the mighty mammoth to the SeaTac Sloth, Washington is a great place for finding fossils.
Burke Museum curator emerita and paleontologist Elizabeth Nesbitt and naturalist David Williams have teamed up to write the ultimate guide to the fossils in this state: "Spirit Whales & Sloth Tales."
The sloth in the title is a 9-foot-tall giant ground sloth - discovered at SeaTac in 1961 when they were building a new runway.
"The construction people pulled up some bone and said 'oh, we should do something with this,' so they came to the Burke and the people here said 'That's a sloth, that's very exciting!'" Nesbitt said.
Pre-history to ponder next time you fly out of Seattle. "So, you think about all the other things that are underneath the runways there, there's probably all sorts of stuff there," Nesbitt said.
A school of fossil salmon was 'caught' by a woman on a riverbank near Shelton. "And she's not doing very well fishing so she looks down at her feet and sees these fossils down at her feet," said Williams.
That discovery proved that a million years ago - salmon migrated just like they do today.
Also in the book, and at the Burke - Washington's first dinosaur, found on Sucia Island in the San Juans.
"It's just a little bit of a femur, but they they know roughly that it's in that family that includes things like T-Rex so it's a carnivore," Williams said.
"It's a big carnivore. 80 million year old," added Nesbitt.
And a rare, intact whale, found in a quarry on the Olympic Peninsula, that's about 30 million years old.
"The whales are definitely the most exciting thing because they are specifically for Washington State. We don't get whales like this anywhere else, except in Japan and New Zealand," explained Nesbitt.
The Burke is more than a museum - it's a research facility where paleontologists uncover pieces of the planet's past.
The only paleontology museum in the state, a place that contains millions of years of Earth's history in hundreds of cabinets.
Spirit Whales & Sloth Tales just doesn't just tell the story of the fossils found in Washington. It shows there are more to be discovered, likely right beneath our feet.
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