As I attempt to catch up on missed work at the museum and get my poster ready for this month’s SVP meeting, I’ve slipped a little on blog updates, but hopefully I can pick up the pace a bit.
On Saturday, after leaving Carmel Church we headed to the Calvert Marine Museum in Solomons, MD, where Stephen Godfrey is the Curator of Paleontology. CMM opened a new paleontology exhibit earlier this year, which I was eager to see.
The new exhibit is very nicely done, and (unlike many exhibits) the A/V components were particularly well designed. At the touch-screen displays you can scroll through time to see paleomap reconstructions, and see where various organisms fit into geologic time.
One of the highlights in this room is the excellent skull of the Late Miocene baleen whale Cephalotropis, which CMM collected a few years ago after it was uncovered by Hurricane Isabel:
Another favorite is the full-size model of a Carcharocles megalodon skeleton located in the next room:
The Calvert Marine Museum is an excellent museum is a picturesque area, and is well worth a visit. In fact, since it’s only a 5.5 hour drive from Solomons to Martinsville, you should visit both CMM and VMNH!
Updates from the Paleontology Lab 
A whale fossil uncovered by a hurricane? Man, that sounds reason enough to visit the museum!
Yea, Isabel was rough for people in the Chesapeake Bay area, but Stephen and I both got some pretty good specimens. Stephen recovered that excellent specimen of Cephalotropis (which was previously a very poorly known whale), while VMNH collected a very good specimen of the sea turtle Syllomus (Syllomus is a very common Calvert fossil, but ours was a particularly good one).
The first fossil whale I ever prepared was exposed near the Pamunkey River in Virginia by flooding caused by Hurricane Camille in 1969. That specimen is now in the VMNH collections.
And, just to be clear, I prepared that Camille specimen some 20 years after it was collected; I was not the collector, as I was only a few months old at the time.