Last month, on a sunny day on the beach, an intern with the Point Reyes National Seashore showed a paleontologist a cliff exposure where the fossil of a marine mammal skull, which she first spotted in May, was jutting out. The paleontologist recognized it as a dolphin fossil, a rare find because they are small.
The two started chipping away and realized it wasn’t just an isolated fragment. “We started to dig and kept going…