They were probably egging them and just leaving the carccasses...
http://www.theolympian.com/home/news/20020630/southsound/6081.shtml Discovery of fossilized salmon points to species' durability
JOHN DODGE
A late August day on the Skokomish River with a fly-fishing rod and reel in his hand is about as good as it gets for Jeff Heinis.
But on this particular day nearly two years ago, the lifelong Skokomish Valley resident landed a catch like no other.
Heinis and friend Summer Burdick stumbled upon a pile of fossilized salmon clearly visible in an eroding bank of the river where it winds through the forested foothills on the south side of the Olympic Mountains.
"Summer said: 'Look at this,' " Heinis recalled.
"I went nuts. Then I started worrying about the responsibility of what we had found."
What the two anglers had found were the remarkably well-preserved remains of roughly 100 salmon entombed in silty sandstone from the Pleistocene Age, the geologic epoch that began 1.6 million years ago with the advance and retreat of continental glaciers in the Northern Hemisphere.
It's the only documented recovery in this state of full-body skeletons of Pleistocene Age fossilized salmon, said James Goedart, an affiliate curator at the Burke Museum at the University of Washington.
In the gathering dusk, Heinis covered the treasure of ancient salmon with brush, then scurried away to alert the landowner -- Shelton-based Simpson Timber Co. -- and biologists, with the Skokomish Indian Tribe, the indigenous people of the area.
The discovery was a powerful one for the tribe, noted David Herrera, fisheries manager for the Skokomish tribe.
"Finding ancient salmon on the Skokomish reinforces the Skokomish people's relationship with salmon," he said.
"We have always depended on the salmon culturally, economically and spiritually."
Museum involved
Simpson Timber Co. officials contacted curators at the Burke Museum for assistance in preserving and protecting the ancient salmon remains.
A crew from the Burke Museum, the pre-eminent natural history museum in the Pacific Northwest, came to the site and removed more than a dozen samples.
Further site excavation is scheduled for this summer.
"This is a very important find," said Bruce Crowley, a Burke Museum paleontologist assigned the task of preserving and identifying the fossils.
"As soon as we have the samples more stable, we can start finding out what kind of salmon these are and more exactly how old they are."
The fossils are at least 50,000 years old and could date back as far as 1.6 million years, Crowley said.
The salmon, roughly 2 feet long, are a sight to behold, Heinis said.
"They're pretty much intact," he said.
"You can see their skin and scales."
The images of these salmon encased in stone reinforce the notion that the seven species of salmon within the genus oncorhynchus -- the Russian term for hooknose -- are durable and ever persistent.
Today, they face a host of manmade threats, including habitat loss, overharvest, pollution and dams. Historically, they encountered unfathomable geologic upheaval.
"No other region in North America has been as geologically active as the Pacific Northwest," fisheries biologist Jim Lichatowich notes in his book, "Salmon Without Rivers: A History of the Pacific Salmon Crisis."
"Mountains rose, the coastline migrated, the climate changed drastically, and volcanoes flooded large areas of the region with thick layers of molten lava."
Many fish species did not survive.
"But the tough and tenacious salmon endured, and their resilience is still a source of hope for the future," Lichatowich writes.
A long history
No one knows exactly how old Pacific salmon are, but they may have split off as a separate family of fishes as many as 100 million years ago.
Current theory suggests prehistoric salmon began as lake dwellers and did not take to the oceans until the marine waters cooled considerably during the Oligocene Age some 40 million years ago.
The genus oncorhynchus probably emerged in the Miocene Age 24 million years ago as the Northwest coast began to take shape.
One now extinct salmonid from this era is the saber-toothed salmon. Weighing hundreds of pounds, it had a pair of enormous curved teeth, but fed chiefly on plankton, Lichatowich writes.
The ancestors of today's Pacific salmon, such as those found in the banks of the Skokomish River, originated in the Pleistocene Age, a time when the watersheds and river systems of today began to form.
Then the Holocene Age, a period of intense glacier activity, took center stage.
"The glaciers have moved back and forth several times since the time these salmon swam here," Crowley said. "Every time the glaciers came and went, they changed how rivers flowed."
Roughly 18,000 years ago, long after the Skokomish fish were fossilized, the region experienced the Wisconsin Ice Age and its Cordilleran ice sheet, which covered the lowlands of Puget Sound with a sheet of ice some 4,000 feet thick.
Still, the salmon survived, finding refuge in ice-free rivers, including the Chehalis, Columbia and Sacramento rivers, Lichatowich notes.
What happened to seal the fate of the ancient Skokomish salmon is anybody's guess.
The pronounced teeth on some of the specimens suggest they may be spawned-out salmon that fell to the bottom of a lake, Goedart said.
Heinis, who now works as a habitat biologist with the Skokomish tribe, feels blessed to have found the salmon, which are in a steadily eroding river bank.
"Not many people walk by where the fossils would have been visible," he said. "We are lucky we found them when we did."
Crowley, who specializes in preserving fragile fossils, said he needs some help identifying the ancient salmon, some of which look like modern day steelhead.
"We don't have a fossil fish expert at the Burke Museum," he said.
"But at some point, I expect we'll have them on public display."
John Dodge is a senior reporter and Sunday columnist for The Olympian. He can be reached at 360-754-5444 or by e-mail at jdodge@olympia.gannett.com.
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