Did you know that Alabama has a state fossil? (Although it looks like a dinosaur to the untrained eye, it’s a whale/mammal and dinosaurs are reptiles.) It was famously immortalized in Herman Melville’s, “Moby Dick” in 1851.

“But by far the most wonderful of all Cetacen relics was the almost complete vast skeleton of an extinct monster, found in the year 1842, on the plantation of Judge Creagh, in Alabama.

The Alabama doctors declared it a huge reptile…but some specimen bones of it being taken across the sea to Owen, the English Anatomist, it turned out that this alleged reptile was a whale, though of a departed species…”

A replica of the Eocen whale is currently suspended at the Alabama Museum of Natural History in Tuscaloosa, as presented by aquatic biologist and amateur paleontologist, Dr. William Deutsch, at Monday night’s packed 82nd annual meeting of the Birmingham Historical Society.

His talk showed how and why Alabama is rich in fossils with “the highest fossil diversity of any state east of the Mississippi River”. He acknowledges the contributions of the many who’ve unearthed its history. And he tells why an understanding of our ‘deep time’ is important today.

Deutsch illustrated his talk, “A Walk Through Deep Time: 500 Million Years of Alabama History,” with a rope curled and stretched across the large auditorium to replicate time since the Big Bang. The indiscernible, minute, end point of the rope represented our modern times, causing him to end the presentation with a theological thought he ponders often on the age of the fossils he studies.

“The next time you see a fossil along a creek, roadside, or on display, stop ponder, and preferably hold it in your hand. The lowly fossil speaks a clear nonverbal message:

I am real. I am very old. I lived long before you–long before your species. If you allow, I will guide you to think deeply about time, life, death, and meaning. It’s in your hands. “

His well- illustrated, heavily researched, but easily understood book, Ancient Life in Alabama: The Fossils, The Finders, and Why it Matters was published by MindBridge Press in Florence, Alabama, and is available HERE.