Seal bones found on shores of Lake Champlain

PSU students find salt-water remains on lake shore

By JEFF MEYERS

Staff Writer

PLATTSBURGH — The region's newest celebrity is headed for the big time.

Plattsburgh State professor David Franzi and his environmental geotechnology class often work out of the classroom to study glacial till on the shores of Lake Champlain.

It was during a recent visit to the steep incline rising from the lake near the former Plattsburgh Air Force Base marina that one of Franzi's students uncovered something unusual hidden in the muddy goop.

"He called out to us, 'Hey, I've hit some bones,'" Franzi said of that moment when his student found what seemed to be fossilized animal bones. "The thing clanked (when the student's shovel hit bone)."

CLEANING UP BONES

The excited students began rummaging through the thick mud at the site. They collected several bones before Franzi decided to stop for the day so he could contact the New York State Museum about the find.

The group brought the collection back to the lab, cleaned up the specimens and found a leg bone, vertebrae, fingers and toes and several bits and pieces of bone that seemed to be from some kind of aquatic mammal.

He contacted Robert Feranec, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the State Museum, and forwarded him images of the bones.

"I'm 100-percent certain what we have here is a seal," Feranec said from the Plattsburgh site last week, where he and Franzi had returned to search for more evidence of the rare find. "I'm 95 percent convinced it's a harbor seal, but subsequent tests will verify that."

DIED AT SEA

As a massive glacier receded from the region 12,000 years ago, sea water from the north replaced the ice and formed the Champlain Sea, bringing with it a plethora of marine animals, including the seal that has just come to light after resting in the mud for thousands of years.

"Where we're standing was at one time hundreds of feet beneath the surface," Franzi said. "This little guy was swimming around up there and eventually drifted to the sea bottom when he died."

Finding so many bones in one spot was a remarkable stroke of luck, Feranec noted.

"When people find a fully intact mastodon, that's because that animal wandered into a pond, drowned and was eventually buried whole there. This animal died in open water, and its body was probably scattered over a large area."

'NEAT FIND'

Still, Feranec has enough evidence to make a clear identification of the species and may even be able to test for an age of the animal if enough of its tissue still remains in the partially fossilized bones.

He will spend the next few weeks cleaning and drying the bones at the State Museum in Albany before placing the specimen in the museum's collection.

The bones will probably not be placed on public display but will be used for future research to help determine what life might have been like for animals that inhabited the Champlain Sea long before the ocean water receded and left the existing Lake Champlain.

"This is a neat find," said Feranec, who has been at the State Museum for about three years and has had only one other similar find since starting the job. "I'm very happy they called me."

SAMMY

Franzi was also involved in uncovering a musk oxen in the Elizabethtown area two decades ago. Skeletal remains from beluga whales have been uncovered in the region, as well, more evidence of what life would have been like when the North Country was covered by sea water.

Students involved in the find were Brian Gamache, Jake McAdoo, Zachary Irwin, Katherine Bazan, Jacob Barnhart, Jason Klein and Gregory Colucci.

The group has named their find Sammy the Seal in honor of Samuel de Champlain's quadricentennial celebration, Franzi said.

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