In the 1980s, Elwyn L. Simons and Philip D. Gingerich started to excavate at Qasr el-Sagha and Wadi El Hitan with the hope of finding material that could match archaeocete fossils from Pakistan. Since then, over 500 archaeocete skeletons have been found at these two locations, of which most are "B. isis" or "D. atrox", several of the latter carrying bite marks assumed to be from the former. A 1990 paper described additional fossils including foot bones and speculated that the reduced hind limbs were used as copulatory guides. One thing that was noted, was that whale fossils were so common, that when a mason company looked at their newest table counter, they realized that they had created a cross section of a 40 million year old Basilosaurid fossil. This find was another thing that caught the eye of Gingerich.