Scientists Confirm Rochester Trio’s Whale of a Tale

It took more than 40 years and a chance encounter with a geologist from the Washington Department of Natural Resources for Mike Cordell and Wes Anderson of Rochester to prove one whale of a tale.

The two men swore up and down for decades that they stumbled across a trove of whale fossils in 1972 or so while walking along Union Pacific Railroad tracks next to the Chehalis River. Rumors of calcified clam shells and the like were commonplace at the time, but nobody believed Anderson, a high school student, or the slightly older Cordell had made such a discovery.

Now, with a study recently published in the Royal Society Open Science journal in London, the excavation of two more fossilized vertebrae from the same location as all those years ago and plans to display some of the fossils at Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture in Seattle, the men are proud to have been proven right.

“After all those years, it’s a kind of validation,” Anderson said. “I mean, who would believe a couple of kids like that? I even took my uncle down there — he was a fire captain with the Centralia Fire Department — and the people at Centralia College didn’t believe him.”

Rochester realtor Larry Weaver didn’t know he was contributing to the greater scientific good when he stopped to talk to Michael Polenz, who was collecting ground samples when Weaver drove up alongside him. After chatting for a few minutes, Weaver asked Polenz, who works for the Washington Division of Geology and Earth Resources, if he’d heard anything about a whale skeleton found back in the 1970s.

Weaver grew up with Anderson and Cordell in the Rochester area. He heard the story from Cordell about how he and Anderson had found some bones and clamshells at the base of a hillside. 

Cordell then scampered up the hill and came across vertebrae and the remnants of what looked like a ribcage. Each man hauled a vertebrae out that night, but one soon disintegrated and the other disappeared with a friend who said he was going to get it examined.

“It was almost like a fairy tale, a legend that had been around for a long time and that nobody had ever really confirmed,” Weaver said. “Everything apparent in there is pretty well and gone. The story was that years ago, the place was quarantined off because of the danger of slides, but I think people were in there excavating and didn’t want anyone to know about it.”

A few days after Weaver asked Polentz about the whale, he received an email with the study published in April 2018 by Carlos Mauricio Peredo and Nicholas D. Pyenson. They had used a fossilized skull and jawbone collected just yards from where Cordell and Anderson had been to examine how Salishicetus whales transitioned from being meat eaters to using baleen to strain krill and other tiny animals from the water.

Peredo told The Chronicle the fossils they used for the study were collected during the mid-1960s by someone living in Los Angeles. They sat in a drawer for many years until he and Pension began working on their research.

“What we’ve been able to figure out is that all of the tooth loss happens before baleen comes into play,” Peredo said. “These fossils showed that not only did the whales have teeth, they were very elaborate and highly adapted for chewing. That leads us to believe that if we want to learn something about their tooth loss, we have to move along the family tree to a different spot because it’s not happening where we thought it was. So while the fossils in Rochester didn’t lead directly to that, it’s a key piece of the puzzle in that context.”

Polentz returned to Rochester in March and a team of geologists. They went with Weaver and Anderson to find the spot Anderson remembered from decades prior. Salishicetus whales have been dated to the Late Oligocene epoch, which ended more than 23 million years ago, and are named for the Salish Sea.

When he was confident they were in the right place, the geologists ran the coordinates and found out they were about 50 feet from the longitude and latitude specified by Peredo and Pyenson. What was initially a mission to gather soil samples became a fossil hunt when the group turned up large shards of rock embedded with dozens of fossilized clamshells.

They soon uncovered what seemed to be another vertebrae, which was confirmed by field testing that showed calcification of the bone. That artifact went back to Olympia with the state team, but Anderson and Weaver returned later the same month and harvested a fourth vertebrae from the ground, which remains in their possession.

“I was pretty excited when I heard what all they had found,” Cordell said. “I had anticipated it was a creature, you can look at the bones and see where the marrow was, and we had seen where the ribs would have attached going back into the bank. Just think, if they would have contacted us back then, I could have taken them right to where I had found it.”

Weaver doesn’t anticipate further site work to be taken up by the Department of Natural Resources or other agencies. The hillside above the riverbank is unstable and features a large overhang the property owners fear could crumble with more excavation.

Cordell still has a smaller fossil he picked up back in the 1970s, but the vertebrae fossils weigh between from 120 to 200 pounds. Weaver said he’s heard from the Lucky Eagle Casino, which is interested in displaying the one vertebrae still in Rochester.

The three men don’t have high hopes they’ll find out much anytime soon about what they’ve come across; scientists often spend years conducting research and running batteries of tests before making any conclusive findings available for peer review, let alone publication.

“It’s still pretty cool to find such an old whale in your backyard,” Weaver said. “It’s so much fun to have something other than pocket gophers to identify with Rochester.”

Cordell chimed in, “But, now we have whale gophers.”