A family uncovered a 20-million-year-old fossil on a Victorian beach. Then they lost it

Just a week before Christmas, a Museums Victoria staffer was doing an end-of-year sweep of the company inbox when an email caught their eye.

In a few clicks, they had forwarded it to marine palaeontologist Erich Fitzgerald: a family had come across what looked to be whale bones on Ocean Grove beach on the Bellarine Peninsula. Was it of interest?

The response from the palaeontologist came within minutes, and in capital letters: “YES”.

The Davidson family stumbled upon the fossilised vertebrae – now thought to date back 20 million years – on a beach walk last Wednesday evening. They immediately wondered if it was a hoax.

Kristina Davidson was the first to spot it: bones jutting out atop a rock formation, unearthed from beneath a layer of sand by unusual tides. She called to her children and husband Nick – and they began looking for a hidden camera.

“I pretty much literally just happened to be at the right place at the right time. We had just explored some rock pools; I walked past it,” Kristina said.

The family, from Cooktown in far north Queensland, dug beneath the fossil to reveal it further, and Nick’s brother – Age visual journalist Matt Davidson – later rushed down to the beach in excitement.

He reported the find to Museums Victoria and the palaeontologist was soon on the phone to the family. Only then did the gravity of their discovery sink in.

“You don’t recognise the value instantly and, when the museum representatives came down and threw out this 20 million [year] timeframe – it’s just mind-blowing,” Kristina said, laughing.

The family was back at the beach on Thursday, this time with Geelong Gem and Mineral Club field officer Yestin Griffiths, to get the fossil’s precise co-ordinates for museum staff.

It seemed like an easy task, with Nick telling his family, “Let’s go quickly to the beach, take the co-ordinates, and go back swimming.” It took them six hours.

The family were on their hands and knees digging up the beach, and broke multiple plastic spades in the process in 30-degree heat.

As the hours, and dead ends, came and went, their frustration grew. But the excitement of the search was contagious.

“I get hangry … it was hot, it was really sunny. I’m extremely sunburned. But in that moment, everything went to the backburner,” Kristina said. “It was like this huge treasure hunt, so it was really quite exciting.”

Finally, they found the fossil again, allowing Griffiths time to quickly examine it. A full-scale investigation will begin in the new year, to salvage and then analyse the specimen over many months.

Griffiths was stunned by the fossil’s preservation and the rarity of how many of its bones were in their original place.

“It truly looked like the animal had just passed away, gone to the bottom of the ocean, then up,” he said. “Oh my gosh. It’s like it died, not yesterday, but a week ago.”

Fitzgerald, Museums Victoria’s senior curator of vertebrate palaeontology, said the Davidsons’ find was one of many significant fossil whale discoveries on the Bellarine and Surf Coasts over the past 20 years.

His team hoped to reveal more about the fossil in the new year, and greatly appreciated members of the public reporting their discoveries to Museums Victoria, Fitzgerald said.

In 2019, local school principal Ross Dullard found a partial skull of a Janjucetus – an extinct baleen whale – while on a walk near Jan Juc on Victoria’s Surf Coast. The 25-million-year-old fossil was later named Janjucetus dullardi in his honour.

Kristina and Nick Davidson have since left Ocean Grove to visit family in Ballarat, but the surprise of their discovery lingers for their children, who Nick describes as “barefoot, Cooktown breeds”.

“They were pretty excited about this,” he says.

They’ve left what’s being dubbed, for now, as “Davidson’s whale”, in their wake.

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