Click the link below the picture
.
Thirteen years ago, paleontologist Mario Urbina made a remarkable discovery in the coastal desert of Peru. He had a hunch that it was something really special. But his conclusion was so odd that it took years of excavation and testing to show international scientists that his convictions were right, according to Urbina’s field partner and fellow paleontologist Rodolfo Salas-Gismondi, head of the vertebrate paleontology department at the Museum of Natural History in Lima. They were fossil masses, and what Urbina thought they were: preserved bones from a new species of early whale, dating to 39 million years ago. And, it turns out, this one was a whopper.
“The authors have definitely found something new. This is a really weird, stupendously large, early whale,” says paleobiologist Nicholas Pyenson, the curator of fossil marine mammals at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.
This whale relative, named Perucetus colossus—“the colossal whale from Peru”—is pretty darn big. In their new study published today in Nature, the international team of researchers posit that it could be the heaviest animal. Ever. By their estimates, the species would have had a 65-foot skeleton that outweighs the 82-foot skeleton of a blue whale—the world’s current heavyweight champion species—by two to three times, possibly resulting in an overall body weight of between 90 and 370 tons. At the upper range, that’s more than twice as chonky as a blue whale. Further, this ancient giant falls far earlier in history than scientists would expect, changing the known evolutionary timeline for huge whales up by 30 million years.
.
A reconstruction of P. colossus shows it in its coastal habitat. The head is an educated guess because a skull has not been found yet. Alberto Gennari
.
.
Click the link below for the article:
.
__________________________________________
James' World 2 
Aug 06, 2023 @ 06:25:32
🩵
LikeLike
Aug 06, 2023 @ 06:57:35
Thank you!
LikeLike
Aug 08, 2023 @ 18:00:33