Anthony Howell didn’t expect to find himself at the center of a century-old mystery. But when a museum assistant from Smiths Falls – an Ontario town hundreds of kilometres from any sort of current ocean – reached out about a rumoured set of ancient whale bones, Howell dove in.
“The lore was that there were humpback whale bones in Smiths Falls. It became a bit of a folk story,” said Howell, the curator of Natural History at McGill’s Redpath Museum.
Ayden Tucker, from the Smiths Falls Heritage House Museum, had been searching for clues when he came across a reference to whale bones found near the town in the late 1800s. According to records, the bones were deposited at the Redpath Museum by a Canadian Pacific Railway superintendent in 1882.
At first, Howell wasn’t sure the bones were still in the collection. “The first thing I did was look in the database to see if there’s anything that corresponds to it, and there wasn’t,” he said. “That doesn’t necessarily mean we don’t have it. It just means I have to dig a bit further.”
Howell eventually found two large vertebrae and part of a rib, tucked away in the paleontology collection. The size, colour, and texture of the fossils all matched the original descriptions. Crucially, so did the measurements recorded in archival documents. “From what I can tell, they’re the same texture, they’re the same colour, they’re likely from the same location, and possibly from the same animal,” he said.
Howell and Tucker think the fossils are that of a humpback whale that lived in the Champlain Sea, an ancient inland body of water that, following the last Ice Age, covered much of what is now southern Ontario and Quebec.
“If that’s correct, it would make the bones between 10,000 and 12,000 years old,” Howell said.
Where the trail leads next
According to early documentation, the bones were donated by a Canadian Pacific Railway superintendent named A. Baker. “CP were involved in a lot of geological surveying as they laid the rail,” Howell said. “It’s entirely possible there are more records in CP’s archives, or even in local papers or societies.”
In order to solve the mystery, Howell is collaborating with colleagues in McGill’s Zoology and Wildlife Biology departments to help identify the species.
“If we can confirm they’re humpback whale bones, that would be a huge step forward,” he said.
Howell is also combing through newspaper archives, institutional records, and even the writings of John William Dawson, McGill’s principal in the 1880s and the first director of the Redpath Museum, hoping for more clues.
“Sometimes, the most helpful thing is the dialogue around the specimens; what’s been said or written about them over time.”
The detective work may never yield a definitive answer but, for Howell, the process is the point.
“This is the fun part of working in a museum. It’s about understanding better what we actually have in our collections, so we can make them more accessible for future research.”
Projects like this also reconnect institutions across time and geography.
“A lot of these museums in Canada used to exist as a network,” Howell said. “Every time I get a request like this, it’s like we’re reestablishing a connection. And if it turns out we can confirm what these bones are, it opens a new door for research into the Champlain Sea Basin.”