The rare fossil of a baleen whale, thought to be between 16 million and 17 million years old, has been "rescued" from a Southern California backyard, paleontologists say.
A search and rescue team from the L.A. County Sherriff's Department used ropes and pulleys to free the fossil and remove it from a hillside in Rancho Palos Verdes, southwest of Los Angeles.
The location and size of the fossil within a 1,000-pound rock complicated its recovery, but the fossil's rarity -- it's thought to be one of only about 20 ever discovered-- prompted the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles to ask for help in mounting a removal effort.
"This is a really important fossil," museum paleontologist Howell Thomas said.
The whales get their name from a baleen, a system of plates of soft tissue within their mouth that act as water strainers to gather food. The whales have no teeth.
"Baleen whales don't just grab fish individually -- they actually open their mouth and they suck in a lot of small animals," Howell said. "That actually gives them the capacity to grow large because they're eating a large quantity of small animals at one time. They're filter-feeders."
The fossil whale was not a new discovery; it was first seen in 1978 as teenager Gary Johnson explored the back yard of the family home.
The family contacted a different local museum, but moving the enormous fossil proved too difficult, so it was left in place.
Johnson, now 53, said he recently heard of the Natural History Museum excavating another whale fossil on the grounds of a school nearby and decided to contact it about "his" fossil.
The museum immediately expressed interest, and contacted the Sherriff's Department about the possibility of assistance.
The department agreed to let a 10-member team excavate and remove the fossil as part of a training exercise.
The volunteer crew is normally tasked with the rescue of stranded hikers or motorcyclists who lose control and go off the roads into the area's steep, rugged canyons.
That's usually easier than "rescuing" a 1,000-pound fossil, search-and-rescue chief Mike Leum said.
From now on, he said, "We'll always be able to say, 'it's not heavier than a fossil.'"
Parts of the whale's skull including the jaw and the baleen were fossilized inside the massive rock lying at the base of a hillside between two homes.
The recovery team used pulleys and ropes to hoist the fossil onto a special steel trolley that was hauled up the steep backyard slope to a truck waiting to take it to the museum.
