In Chile's dry, hot, desert-like Atacama Region, a group of Smithsonian researchers are digging up whales. The fossil site, near the port city of Caldera in northern Chile, was discovered in late 2010 by a construction company expanding the Pan-American Highway. In a road cut, the workers discovered complete skeletons of baleen whales, says paleobiologist Nick Pyenson, the curator of fossil marine mammals at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. The company agreed to grant the site a brief reprieve, allowing Pyenson to coordinate a short-term excavation of the fossils
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