Stonehenge and the Ice Age: The whale in the forest

The strange tale of the whale found in the submerged forest at Freshwater West

I have mentioned this before, but the story becomes more and more intriguing, and I am doing some research. All we know at the moment is that in the Geological Memoir for Pembroke and Tenby (Dixon et al, 1921, p 202), there is a section on the submerged forest at Freshwater West, in which "the forest growth appears to have been ended by an invasion of the sea." Dixon reports that an old high-water mark of this episode can be seen not far from the present HWM, where a line or ridge of tumbled tree trunks and other forest debris was (around the time of the First World War) still buried by the modern sandy beach. On the seaward side of this ridge there is a record of submerged forest peaty beds and overlying sandy and silty sediments including unbroken mussel shells -- so this is a record of a terrestrial environment being replaced by a coastal maritime environment. These later sediments "also yielded remains of a whale-skull, probably the common rorqual (Balaenoptera musculus)." That is the blue whale, one of the biggest creatures in the ocean. The skull of an adult blue whale can be around 10m long. A footnote refers to the fact that the remains are "now preserved in the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff."

That's all we know. I have written to the National Museum to see whether they still have the remains down in the basement, and it will be quite splendid if they do -- they should be on display in Pembrokeshire, especially since this is Visit Wales's "Year of the Sea."

Because the stratigraphy is not sorted out, we should be cautious about speculating -- but the ridge of tumbled forest debris does suggest a really catastrophic event (a tsunami?) at the culmination of a long sea-level rise during which the coastal forest was overwhelmed bit by bit, in the period 7,000 - 4,000 years BP. If Dixon is right, and if the whale skull remnants really did come from a blue whale, it must have been washed onto a beach and rolled inland before rotting and then being broken up by waves, ending up buried in the accumulating sediments.

There are plenty of records of land animals in the submerged forest, including pigs, deer, giant elks and aurochs -- but I am not aware of any record of a marine animal being found in association with peat beds and forest remains. I'm asking Dr Martin Bates of Lampeter if he knows anything more.......