In 1849 men cutting a railroad grade through a small hill near Charlotte hit bones in blue clay about ten feet down. They took them for an old horse and smashed most of the skull before a local man, John G. Thorp, talked the overseer into moving the work, and Zadock Thompson of the University of Vermont came to lift the rest. It was a beluga, an adult about twelve feet long, more than 150 miles from the nearest ocean. It swam in the Champlain Sea, an arm of the ocean that filled this valley for about 2,500 years after the glaciers pulled back, before the land rebounded and the salt water drained away. Vermont made it the state fossil in 1993. The skeleton is mounted at the Perkins Museum of Geology at UVM in Burlington; check that the museum is open before you drive.
Beluga whale skeleton · Champlain Sea, 12,500 to 10,000 years ago
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.
Other places on the map within a couple of hours.
