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VENTURA – Fisherman Aaron Plunkett can talk about his whale of a catch that didn’t get away: The Lake Casitas angler snagged fossilized bones of a 25 million-year-old toothed baleen whale, a first-of-its-kind find in California. 

“They’ve been found before in Washington and Oregon and Baja, but we’ve never found one in California,” said Howell Thomas, a paleontologist at the Los Angeles Natural History Museum. “This is the only one ever found in California. 

“We were just kind of waiting to see where the first one would be found. It’s exciting because it proves tooth baleen whales were off the coast of Southern California.” 

Plunkett, an Ojai musician, was fishing at Lake Casitas on Jan. 19 when he noticed what appeared to be bones among the pebbles along the shoreline. The mountain lake is 80 miles northwest of Los Angeles. 

“Twenty-five million years ago, that was all under water,” Thomas said Friday. 

Plunkett contacted paleontologists and they were thrilled. 

“We said, ’Hey, that looks like a primitive bone,” said Thomas, who then accompanied Plunkett to the site and gathered parts of the skull, an ear bone and a tooth and brought them back to the museum adjacent to the Coliseum. 

“He’s a musician,” the paleontologist said. “How he noticed it was a vertebrate is anybody’s guess.” 

The toothed baleen whale, which was about 30 feet long, represents a rare evolutionary link between whales as we know them — with their brushy, plankton-catching plates — and their ancient, toothy ancestors. 

The toothed baleen whale dates back to the earliest part of the Miocene Epoch, and the Casitas find may be one of the last of the toothed baleens to survive past the Oligocene Epoch. 

Plunkett, whose telephone number isn’t listed, has been very protective of his fossil find. In a written statement, Plunkett said he hoped to create an Ojai learning center to house the skeletal remains. 

“I feel it appropriate for the whale to remain in the Ojai Valley,” Plunkett said. 

But Thomas said he is hoping to dig up the entire skeleton later, once the museum is able draw up a budget for digging and cleaning. 

Doug Ralph, director of the Lake Casitas Recreation Area, said he would like excavation to occur quickly for fear scavengers might descend on the site.