Mysterious Whale Fossils Found in Desert

Whale fossils protruding from Cerro Ballena cliffs in Chile’s Atacama Desert north of Caldera, thanks to a road-widening project, are finally being excavated. The fossil graveyard’s census is now up to 75 whales and includes at least 20 perfectly intact specimens. The fossil bonanza is spawning some fantastic fish tales in an effort to explain how the bus-sized aquatic beasts got there.

The Smithsonian’s Nicholas Pyenson, who is working with Chilean paleontologist Mario Suarez on the excavation, says, “I think they died more or less at the same time. . . . There are many ways that whales could die, and we're still testing all those different hypotheses.” He says the region used to be a “lagoon-like environment” and believes the whales died 2 million to 7 million years ago. The scientists have yet to publish their findings, but a variety of opinions have been advanced to explain how these whales ended up half a mile from the ocean in the high dry Atacama Desert.

Vertebrate paleontologist Erich Fitzgerald, commented on the find, “The fossils are exceptionally well preserved and quite complete — a rare combination in paleontology and one that will likely shed light on many facets of the … ecology and evolution of these extinct species.” Despite this phenomenal preservation, Fitzgerald thinks it possible “these fossilized remains may have accumulated over a relatively long period of time,” the Associated Press release suggesting they could have even “died there over a period of a few millennia.”

Most of the fossils are baleen whales, although the collection already includes a sperm whale and an extinct two-tusked dolphin.

Creation scientists point out . . . that the warm mineral-rich waters produced by the Flood would have been able to support the catastrophic diatom bloom evidenced at Pisco, causing aquatic death on a massive scale.

The only other known specimen of this dolphin was found farther north in Peru’s famous Pisco Formation, a fossil graveyard containing 346 whales. The Pisco Formation has excited controversy because uniformitarian scientists cannot see how the diatomite sediment in which the fossils are preserved could have been rapidly produced to cause the simultaneous death and burial of hundreds of whales. Creation scientists point out, however, that the warm mineral-rich waters produced by the Flood would have been able to support the catastrophic diatom bloom evidenced at Pisco, causing aquatic death on a massive scale.1

Since information on the geology of the new find and the specifics of fossil descriptions, such as whether baleen is well-preserved as in Pisco specimens, is not yet available, most speculation will have to wait. However, the excellent preservation of the Cerro Ballena fossils demands a catastrophic cause. If Cerro Ballena turns out to be part of the same geologic formation as Pisco, the cause of death may indeed by the same. The 2 million to 7 million year estimate of the cetacean catastrophe is consistent with the 2.6 million year date conventionally estimated for the first post-Flood Ice Age deposits. Once the data become available, post-Flood catastrophes and conditions prevailing in the wake of the Flood will likely provide a logical explanation for how this large cache of cetacean victims found themselves beached and buried in the desert.2

Of course, the Bible is not consistent with the millions of years estimate. Such dates come from methods based on uniformitarian assumptions disregarding the impact of events like the Flood on earth’s geological history. (See Radiometric Dating: Back to Basics, Radiometric Dating: Problems with the Assumptions, and Radiometric Dating: Making Sense of the Patterns.) The Bible’s chronology is internally consistent and provides an age of the earth of about 6,000 years. The global Flood occurred about 1,700 years after earth’s creation, and the Ice Age it triggered—based on computer simulations of climate conditions—likely occurred within a few hundred years. The global Flood and post-Flood catastrophes explain the majority of the fossil record and would have certainly remodeled the surface of the earth. We look forward to hearing more about the discoveries at Cerro Ballena and are confident that a combination of scientific observation and the answers in Genesis will tell which whale tales might be true.