A roadside hill in the Atacama Desert just north of the port of Caldera in Chile, on the Pan-American Highway, where the Bahia Inglesa Formation holds more than forty whales, adults and juveniles together, in several stacked layers. Military work exposed it in 1965, and a full excavation in 2011 and 2012 read the story out of it: harmful algal blooms, fed by iron washing off the Andes, poisoned the animals at sea, their bodies drifted to the coast and waves pushed them onto a flat tidal shore, over and over across time. Seals, aquatic sloths of the genus Thalassocnus, sailfish, swordfish and sharks lie in the same beds. Chile protected the site by law in 2012 and treats it as a national treasure.
Whale skeletons stacked by ancient toxic blooms · Late Miocene
This ground is protected. Photograph it, record it, leave it where it lies. On US federal land the Paleontological Resources Preservation Act 2009 makes collecting vertebrate fossils an offence, and penalties are real.
Chile
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This is remote ground. The closest other places on the map are a long way off.
