This is a reply to Casey Burns' e-mail to me on 27 June. His e-mail address
was rejected at this end when I tried to reply. Therefore I reply now via
Conch-L.

Dear Casey

I work for Ewan Fordyce, who is the researcher on whales. He says he knows
Jim Goedert. As to myself, I have of course picked up some knowledge,
though not a lot, about whales, while working on their collection and
preparation.

I've heard a lot about Larry Barnes, but never met him.

I have sent the hermitcrab to Rod Feldmann, whom I have met several times.

Very few of our fossil whales have been described, and of these, in recent
years, no mysticetes, as Ewan is concentrating on odontocetes. However we
do have a new family of very slender mysticetes, first known from a
skull/mandibles I discovered in 1985 and which we collected years later.
Ewan does intend to describe this group, but it will be a while.

Most of our specimens include earbones, which show that of all of the many
mysticetes we have collected, only one or two are likely to be conspecific
ie we have a great diversity here.

One group of particular interest is a family of relict toothed mysticetes
we find around the Oligocene-Miocene boundary. They are very
archaeocetelike but small, with beautiful smooth wide-cusped teeth.

Have you ever found any bone-associating gastropods? A few years ago a
German PhD student we had here was preparing a middle Eocene Psephophorus
(leatherback turtle, now described as P. terrypratchetti) and found a small
shell he'd found with it. I recognized it as an Osteopelta (family
Osteopeltidae Marshall Marshall 1987, Lepetelloidea), which I sent to Bruce
Marshall at Museum of NZ. He identified it as indistinguishable from the
Recent type species of the genus, O. mirabilis Marshall 1987. I found
another specimen with this turtle also. Since then I have collected an
early Miocene Coccopygia (Cocculinoidea: Cocculinidae).

Which molluscan genera do you refer to, ie those only occurring in NZ and
the Pacific Northwest? I lived in Victoria, BC from 1967-1973, aged 8-14 at
the time, and was collecting then). I am not really familiar with the
fossil fauna there. I know that today we share some genera eg Fusitriton,
but can't think offhand of anything restricted to our areas.

Regards
Andrew