A 12-million-year-old whale skull was found in Maryland

A fossilized whale skull dating back about 12 million years was found on a beach in Chesapeake Bay, Maryland, according to a local museum.
The Calvert Marine Museum said in a statement that a man from Pennsylvania named Cody Goddard discovered the skull in October while searching for fossils and shark teeth, a common activity in the area.
“We felt like we had won the World Cup of Paleontology!” said Stephen Godfrey, head of paleontology at the museum.
He added that “it is not yet known to which type of Miocene whale” the whale to which the skull belongs, indicating that knowledge of this will not be possible “only when it becomes available to study the skull.”
The museum explained that it took two months to extract and move the skull, which was embedded in a block of sediment. The total weight of this mass is about 295 kilograms.
The museum indicated that it is the most complete fossil of a whale skull that was found in the Calvert Cliffs area, noting that the name “Cody” that was given to it is the name of its discoverer.
Godfrey said that the skull was transferred to the museum’s fossil laboratory and that special tools would be used to extract it from the sediment, a process that takes a few months.