See the Ancient Whale Skull Recovered From a Virginia Swamp | National Geographic

When I first went to the site in the bottom of the river, you see these whale bones and shark teeth just poking out. The river's raging; it's like holding on to a car going 65 miles an hour down the highway. Everything east of the Route 95 on the east side of the United States was underwater at one time. The seas receded, and what was left behind were ancient marine fossil deposits.

Around 2013, I actually pulled up some of the fossils, but there was a really large whale skull I did not pull up. I tried to figure out how we were going to dig it out and then how we were going to actually lift something that's three to five hundred pounds from the bottom of a river in Blackwater and get it back up onto the boat.

Today, we were able to pull up a five-million-year-old skull. This is a baleen whale skull—it's very, very large. Now that the skull is dried out a little bit, I contacted Stephen Godfrey of the Calvert Marine Museum, and he looked at the skull. He definitely confirmed that it was a baleen whale skull, and we're looking at anywhere from four and a half to five and a half million years old.

The skull was around seven feet if it was complete, just based on the evidence that we had. So, we're looking at it—well, that's probably close to 40 feet in length and somewhere around 30 tons. So this was, we've ignored the brain one set of the whale. These were ancient shallow seas and often calving areas for whales, so they've become a great food source for large sharks like Megalodon or very, very large mako sharks.

A lot of the bones that we find have lacerations or chomp marks from these large sharks. You pull these fossils up, and they tell a story. The bite marks and lacerations are to the size of the teeth and the types of sharks—they all tell a story. It's a huge puzzle, and they're putting the pieces together. And this piece would actually fit right in here.