Usually we use our Fossil Friday posts to talk about specimens that are housed in the WSC collections. But today I'm going to talk about our newest 3D print, the skull of the primitive toothed whale Squalodon whitmorei.Squalodonts are a family of toothed whales that lived in the Oligocene and the first half of the Miocene. At one time it was thought they might be close to the transition between Eocene archaeocete whales and modern dolphins and other toothed cetaceans. It turns out they were their own specialized branch of toothed whales, members of a once widespread group called the platanistoids that has since been mostly supplanted by the delphinoids. They have a somewhat primitive look largely because of their extremely heterodont teeth, including serrated, triangular back teeth (hence the name Squalodon, which literally means "shark tooth"). They were among the last groups of cetaceans (maybe THE last group) to retain these triangular, double-rooted back teeth. They are best known from Europe and eastern North America, but examples have been found all over the world.This specimen holds a special place for me, because it was the first fossil vertebrate I ever had the chance to work on. In 1989 I traveled to the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History to talk about possible research topics for my senior thesis at Carleton College. I met paleontologists Clayton Ray, Frank Whitmore, and Dave Bohaska while I was there, and after a day of looking at fossils they suggested that if I wanted to I could come back next summer and work on squalodont whales for my thesis (a group I had never heard of before).The next summer, after securing free housing from a Carleton alumnus, Frank turned over to me several boxes of bone fragments that had been collected by a boy scout troop in Virginia in the 1970s. I spent the next 2 months learning techniques for cleaning and repairing fossils, while Frank tutored my on cetacean anatomy. By the end of the summer I had put together one of the most complete known skeletons of Squalodon, the largest example of the genus ever found:
After successfully defending my undergraduate thesis, I enrolled in graduate school at LSU, and continued my work on squalodonts. This skeleton, along with an additional skull discovered in Virginia in the 1990's, became the main subjects in Chapter 4 of my doctoral dissertation.After completing my doctorate I accepted a position at VMNH, and spent some of my time finishing up projects I had started in graduate school. Finally, in 2005 I formally published "A new species of Squalodon (Mammalia, Cetacea) from the Middle Miocene of eastern North America". That paper established the new species Squalodon whitmorei (named in honor of Frank Whitmore), with this specimen as the holotype.As it turns out, in 2019 and 2020 Western Science Center will be opening two exhibits for which Squalodon whitmorei would be a perfect match. WSC is a Smithsonian Affiliate, so I put in a request through the Affiliates Program to get 3D scans of the skeleton. With their help we arranged to have Bernard Means, a Valley of the Mastodons alum and director of the Virtual Curation Lab at Virginia Commonwealth University visit the Smithsonian and begin scanning the skeleton. While there are still more bones to scan, the cranium has been completed and printed (in six parts) on our Lulzbot printers. Last night I finished painting the printed cranium, which is what I'm holding in the image at the top.We'll be using the printed skull in various education programs at WSC until it goes on exhibit next year.