A Rare Discovery Found in the Champlain Valley

It had been over a hundred years since the last seal fossil discovery, until 2009

Story and photos by Kyler Klix

It was an ordinary day for Dr. David Franzi’s geotechnology class. The students were behind the former Plattsburgh Air Base taking samples of soil when one student struck something hard in some deep mud. This discovery was bones that are estimated to be about 10,000 years old. It will help give geologists, and others studying the Champlain Valley, a better idea of what things were like thousands of years ago.

When Franzi’s student Jake McAdoo first hit something while digging, he said he had hit a railroad spike, which Franzi says is much more likely to happen. Franzi doubted that it was anything good, but he got excited when he found out what they had just discovered.

“It was definitely an awesome experience— especially when it happened by mistake.”

“He said ‘No, I think they’re bones.’ And I thought, ’Well, I sincerely doubt it, so why don’t you keep digging,’” Franzi says.

As soon as Franzi saw they were bones, he borrowed a cell phone and called the New York State Museum to pass on the news.

Student Katherine Bazan was in the class during the discovery and thought it was a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence.

“It was definitely an awesome experience — especially when it happened by mistake,” she says.

In the initial search, the students found several bones. Dr. Robert Feranec came from the New York State Museum and found more when he and Franzi went out to look the next day, which included a jaw bone and four ribs. They found a tooth in the mud after digging for three hours the next day, so a total of 17 bones were discovered.

Franzi said this was significant because the last time a seal fossil was discovered in the Champlain Valley was in 1901, which was just one bone. He explains that there have been 23 seals and 22 whales found in the entire basin, but the amount of bones they found was substantial.

“You hardly ever find as many bones as we did,” he says.

He explains that there were herds of seals living in the Champlain Sea thousands of years ago. There could be lots of bones and fossils from this, but it all depends on what the bones went through after the animal died.

“The seals lived through many generations, and you’d expect to find more,” he says.

Since there had been thousands of years since the animal died, a number of things could have taken place to make the bones disappear. He says the bones could decompose if exposed to oxygen, or if the seal died on a beach, then it would all decompose in the sun. He considers it lucky that the class found the material close enough to the surface and in a preserved condition.

“Preserving the bones is a trick itself,” he says.

Once the bones were gathered, Franzi sent them to the state museum with Feranec, who is a curator of Pleistocene vertebrate paleontology. He studies the ecology of animals but not particularly marine animals. He was called to study the bones because he studies similar animals with the same kind of remains.

“It’s different working with the different animals,” he says. “It’s not my expertise, so I’m learning as I go along.”

“You hardly ever find as many bones as we did.”

Since the bones have come to the museum, there are many steps they must take when studying them. After cleaning them properly, Feranec said the first thing they must do is understand the species these bones came from. They know it’s a seal but not which type.

“I am sure it’s a harbor seal,” he says. “But we have to do an exhaustive comparison with five to 10 other species to make sure.”

Franzi said there are four types of seals that lived in the Champlain Sea: ring, harbor, harp and bearded seals. Both Franzi and Feranec are sure the bones belonged to a harbor seal, but it is undetermined.

As of the second week in October, Feranec took collagen samples from the tibia to send to a carbon-dating lab. He said it will take six weeks to two months before they know the exact date the seal came from. It is already estimated that the bones are anywhere between 9,000 and 13,000 years old.

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