Based on a partial skeleton recovered in Peru, scientists believe a newly discovered whale that lived roughly 40 million years ago was the biggest mammal ever.
The contemporary blue whale has long been thought to be the largest and heaviest mammal ever, dwarfing all dinosaurs from the distant past.
According to a paper published in the journal Nature, Perucetus colossus, the Peruvian enormous whale, may have been even heavier.
An international team of researchers calculated the animal’s average body mass to be 180 tonnes based on several huge bones discovered in the Peruvian desert.
That would not be enough to win the heavyweight belt on its own. According to Guinness World Records, the largest blue whale ever recorded weighed 190 tonnes.
However, the researchers determined that the ancient whale weighed between 85 and 340 tonnes, implying that it may have been much larger.
Mario Urbina, a palaeontologist who has spent decades combing the desert on Peru’s southern coast, discovered the first fossil of the ancient whale in 2010.
“There is no record of the existence of an animal as large as this, it is the first, and that’s why nobody believed me when we discovered it”, Urbina explained.
This discovery, according to the researcher, will raise more questions than answers and give the rest of the palaeontologists plenty to talk about.
The remains were shown to the public for the first time during a press conference at the Natural History Museum in Lima, Peru, where they are currently on display.
Scientists believe the beast was roughly 20 metres (65 feet) long.
The scientists took cautious not to reveal that the old whale had beaten the record.
“However, there was no reason to think that this specimen was the largest of its kind”, research co-author Eli Amson explained.
“I believe some of the individuals broke the record, but the take-home message is that we are in the ballpark of the blue whale”, said Amson, a palaeontologist at Germany’s State Museum of Natural History Stuttgart.
At the location, 13 massive vertebrae were discovered, one of which weighed approximately 200 kilogrammes (440 pounds), as well as four ribs and a hip bone.
It took years and several visits to collect and prepare the massive fossils, and it took even longer for the team of Peruvian and European academics to validate what they had discovered.
Scientists discovered a new species of basilosaurid, an ancient family of cetaceans, on Wednesday.
Cetaceans today include dolphins, whales, and porpoises, but their predecessors lived on land, with some resembling miniature deer.
They eventually went into the water, and basilosaurids are thought to be the first cetaceans to live entirely in the water.
One of their adaptations at the time was gigantism, which caused them to grow enormously large.
The discovery, however, suggests that cetaceans achieved their maximal body mass around 30 million years sooner than previously thought.
Amson claimed that the Perucetus colossus, like other basilosaurids, probably had a ridiculously small skull in comparison to its body, albeit there were no bones to support this.
It was impossible to tell what they ate because they didn’t have any teeth. However, Amson thought that scavenging from the seafloor was a major possibility, owing in part to the animals’ inability to swim swiftly.
Because of the unusual heaviness of its bones, the researchers were convinced that the animal lived in shallow waters in coastal habitats.
Its entire skeleton was estimated to weigh between five and seven tonnes, making it more than twice as heavy as a blue whale’s skeleton.
Perucetus colossus needs strong bones to compensate for the massive amount of buoyant fat, and air in its lungs, that would otherwise cause it to bob to the surface.
“However, a precise mix of bone density and blubber allowed the massive animal to remain in the centre of roughly 10 metres (33 feet) of water without moving a muscle”, Amson explained.
According to Felix Marx, a marine mammal expert at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa who was not involved in the research, Perucetus colossus is very different from anything else we’ve ever found.
He cautioned that extinct sea cows possessed heavier bones than would be predicted for their overall body weight, which could imply Perucetus colossus was on the lighter end of its estimated weight range.
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