A recent addition to West’s lengthy list of discoveries was made when senior James Che and junior Ben Ghaffar uncovered yet another fossil. The specimen was found near the school’s creek following a Natural History Club meeting.

“Ben was waiting to be picked up, so we decided to head over to the creek,” Che said. “Ben had heard about the previous fossil discoveries on campus and thought it would be cool to find one too.”

After flipping over rocks along the creek, Che and Ghaffar discovered the fossil.

“At the time, we felt so excited and intrigued by our discovery that we were trembling a bit,” Ghaffar said. “We left the parking lot talking about how lucky it was to come across the fossil and even more about how, without each other, we wouldn’t have come across it.”

The fossil is the right lower jaw of a medium-sized Endochus Petrosus, commonly referred to as a sabre-toothed herring. The size of the jaw places the specimen at 15 to 20 pounds in weight and four to five feet in length.

“It is a prehistoric fish, closely related to the salmon,” Ghaffar said. “Notable features include its sabre-like tooth, a front fang that can grow up to six centimeters long.”

The fang was detached from the fossil but is present in the creek matrix. Future plans for the fossil include an excavation of the rest of the specimen by the Natural History Club.

“The fossil is approximately 85 to 87 million years old,” Kirpach said. “The awesome thing about finding a fossil like this is that, until James and Ben showed me the fossil, these students were the only two people in the history of man to have seen this specimen.”

This is not Che’s first discovery. He is currently co-authoring a paper with Dr. John Jagt of the Maastricht Natural History Museum about the heteromorph ammonite fossil he found last year.

“Finding a fossil of this species is definitely not anything new in the scientific world, but it says a lot about how easy it is to be a part of the scientific community,” Che said. “All it took was lifting a rock off the ground.”