Elizabeth Nesbitt with some of the whale fossils in the Burke Museum’s collection. University of Washington
A newly discovered species of whale - found preserved in ancient rock on the Oregon coast - has been named for a University of Washington paleontologist. "It's a tremendous honor,” said Elizabeth Nesbitt , who is curator of invertebrate paleontology and micropaleontology at the Burke Museum and an associate professor in the UW's Department of Earth and Space Sciences. Maiabalaena nesbittae lived about 33 million years ago and was described in a Nov. 29 study published in Current Biology by researchers at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. The genus portion of the name combines "balaena,” the Latin word for whale, and "maia” meaning mother, because this species, that had neither teeth nor baleen, is the intermediate stage between modern, filter-feeding baleen whales and their toothed whale ancestors. The Smithsonian paleontologists concluded that this whale used suction to pull fish or squid into its mouth. Burke Museum: " Newly described fossil whale named after Burke curator " GeekWire: " A fossil named after Burke Museum curator tells whale of a tale about evolution " - While Nesbitt's research is mostly on smaller fossils of marine animals without backbones, she was instrumental in figuring out the age of Washington and Oregon rocks that the marine mammal fossils are found in. In January, Nesbitt published a paper about the ages of the geologic units in Washington and Oregon that are younger than 50 million years old.
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