A 20-million-year-old whale vertebrae fossil has been named after the Cooktown family who discovered the specimen while on holiday. Photo: Supplied.
In a stroke of luck, a childhood dream came true when a Cooktown man and his family discovered a 20-million-year-old whale fossil on a Victorian beach.
Nick Davidson was enjoying a cooldown on Ocean Grove Beach just before Christmas when his wife Kristina came across a fossilised section of vertebrae.
“The sands had shifted in such a way to expose it in a way it isn’t usually exposed,” he said.
“It was luck of the draw to be there at the right place and time, and to have some understanding of what we were looking at.”
Mr Davidson excitedly shared the find with his brother Matt, who had been interested in palaeontology since childhood, and had a few contacts at Museums Victoria.
It was only when a museum representative estimated the specimen to be 20 million years old that the family realised just how big a discovery they had made.
“We knew it was special, but we probably didn’t realise quite how special,” he said.
By the next morning, the Davidson family was back on the beach with a museum representative to get the coordinates of the artefact’s location, but the vertebrae was nowhere to be seen.
“We went back the next day to find that overnight, the tide had buried it again,” he said.
“We had four photos of the kids digging up this thing with a bit of background in them, and those four photos gave us enough information to sort of triangulate a position.
“In total, I think we spent about five hours digging holes in the vicinity of where the fossil was.”
The hot and sweaty effort was completely worth it for Mr Davidson, who used to fantasise about finding treasures from the past as a child — an adventurous side he has passed down to his own children.
“As kids, we’d spend our summers around those coastlines, and you’d wander along, always looking for fossils,” he said.
“We never really did find anything, so to find this was astounding, because not only was it substantial in size, but the preservation was just amazing.
“We spend a bit of time in Cooktown looking for relics — pennies and old artefacts from the turn of the last century or during the war, so that sort of stuff is definitely of interest, and I think that’s flowed through to the kids.”
The fossil, which has been dubbed the “Davidson’s whale” for the time being, is safely buried in the sand again as the museum begins the process of retrieval and research this year.
Museums Victoria will launch a full-scale investigation of the fossilised vertebrae section this year. Photo: Supplied.
