Astonishing Whale graveyard: Five-million-year-old mystery solved

LONDON: Scientists believe they have unravelled the mystery behind a graveyard of whales dating back five million years uncovered beside the Pan-American Highwayin Chile. A report published today in the Royal Society Journal B suggests the animals, which are one of the most astonishing fossil discoveries in recent years, may have died in four mass strandings after ingesting toxic algae. 

The animal carcasses are then thought to have washed into an estuary before becoming buried by sand over time, preserving the fossils. 

Northern Chile's Atacama Desert has become well known for preserving whale fossils after the site was discovered during an expansion project of the Pan-American Highway in 2010. Bones could be seen sticking out of rock faces, leading many to nickname the spot Cerro Ballena, or "whale hill", as a result. 

American and Chilean paleontologists were finally given the opportunity to properly examine the fossil beds when a cutting was made to widen the highway in 2011. 

A team from the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History and Chilean scientists had just two weeks to undertake their investigations before the heavy plant returned to complete construction of the new road, according to the BBC. 

The team recorded as much detail as possible and created 3D models of the skeletal remains in situ. They also removed some bones from the site to study further in the lab. 

In addition to the skeletons of more than 40 large baleen whales that dominated the site, the team documented the remains of an extinct walrus-like whale - dolphins which evolved a walrus-like face -and found skeletons of billfishes, seals and aquatic sloths. 

"To me, it's amazing that in 240m of road-cut, we managed to sample all the superstars of the fossil marine-mammal world in South America in the Late Miocene. Just an incredibly dense accumulation of species," Nicholas Pyenson, a palaeontologist at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, told the BBC. 

The team also noted how the carcasses were arranged. The skeletons, which were nearly all complete, were preserved in four separate levels, pointing to a repeated and similar underlying cause of death. But the different fossils levels suggested it was not one event but four separate episodes spread over a period of several thousand years. 

From their research, the scientists concluded toxins generated by harmful algal blooms are likely to have poisoned the animals. If the algae were inhaled or large quantities of contaminated prey consumed, death would have been rapid. 

"All the creatures we found - whether whales, seals or billfishes - fed high up in marine food webs and that would have made them very susceptible to harmful algal blooms," Dr Pyenson said. 

The bodies would then have been funnelled into a restricted area by the coastline at Cerro Ballena in the late Miocene period (five to 11-million-years-ago). Once stranded on the tidal flat, the dead or dying animals would have been protected from marine scavengers. 

However, the team could not say for certain that harmful algal blooms were responsible for the mass strandings, as there were no distinct algal cell fragments present in the sediments. They did find multiple grains encrusted in iron oxides that could suggest past algal activity. 

Dr Pyenson added: "They're found in algal-like mats all around the site. We can't say whether those were the killer algae, but they do not falsify the argument for harmful algal blooms being the cause in the way that the sedimentology falsifies tsunami being a potential cause."

US couple finds $10 million in gold coins while walking their dog

LOS ANGELES: A California couple out walking their dog on their property stumbled across a modern-day bonanza: $10 million in rare, mint-condition gold coins buried in the shadow of an old tree. 

Nearly all of the 1,427 coins, dating from 1847 to 1894, are in uncirculated, mint condition, said David Hall, co-founder of Professional Coin Grading Service of Santa Ana, which recently authenticated them. Although the face value of the gold pieces only adds up to more than $28,000, some of them are so rare that coin experts say they could fetch nearly $1 million apiece. 

"I don't like to say once-in-a-lifetime for anything, but you don't get an opportunity to handle this kind of material, a treasure like this, ever," said veteran numismatist Don Kagin, who is representing the finders. "It's like they found the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow." 

Kagin, whose family has been in the rare-coin business for 81 years, would say little about the couple other than that they are husband and wife, are middle-aged and have lived for several years on the rural property where the coins were found. They have no idea who put them there, Kagin said. 

The pair are choosing to remain anonymous, Kagin said, in part to avoid a renewed gold rush to their property by modern-day prospectors armed with metal detectors. 

They also don't want to be treated any differently, said David McCarthy, chief numismatist for Kagin Inc. of Tiburon. 

"Their concern was this would change the way everyone else would look at them, and they're pretty happy with the lifestyle they have today," he said. 

They plan to put most of the coins up for sale through Amazon while holding onto a few keepsakes. They'll use the money to pay off bills and quietly donate to local charities, Kagin said. 

Before they sell them, they are loaning some to the American Numismatic Association for its National Money Show, which opens Thursday in Atlanta. 

What makes their find particularly valuable, McCarthy said, is that almost all of the coins are in near-perfect condition. That means that whoever put them into the ground likely socked them away as soon as they were put into circulation. 

Because paper money was illegal in California until the 1870s, he added, it's extremely rare to find any coins from before that of such high quality. 

"It wasn't really until the 1880s that you start seeing coins struck in California that were kept in real high grades of preservation," he said. 

The coins, in $5, $10 and $20 denominations, were stored more or less in chronological order, McCarthy said, with the 1840s and 1850s pieces going into one canister until it was filed, then new coins going into the next one and the next one after that. The dates and the method indicated that whoever put them there was using the ground as their personal bank and that they weren't swooped up all at once in a robbery. 

Although most of the coins were minted in San Francisco, one $5 gold piece came from as far away as Georgia. 

Kagin and McCarthy would say little about the couple's property or its ownership history, other than it's in a sprawling hilly area of Gold Country, as the region that was the site of the 1849 Gold Rush is known. The coins were found along a path the couple had walked for years. On the day they found them last spring, the woman had bent over to examine an old rusty can that erosion had caused to pop slightly out of the ground. 

"Don't be above bending over to check on a rusty can," he said she told him. 

They are located on a section of the property the couple nicknamed Saddle Ridge, and Kagin is calling the find the Saddle Ridge Hoard. He believes it could be the largest such discovery in US history. 

One of the largest previous finds of gold coins was $1 million worth uncovered by construction workers in Jackson, Tennessee, in 1985. More than 400,000 silver dollars were found in the home of a Reno, Nevada, man who died in 1974 and were later sold intact for $7.3 million. 

Gold coins and ingots said to be worth as much as $130 million were recovered in the 1980s from the wreck of the SS Central America. But historians knew roughly where that gold was because the ship went down off the coast of North Carolina during a hurricane in 1857.