2023-08-02 18:01:51
A now-extinct whale is the heaviest animal ever, scientists have found in an international study. Its weight exceeded that of the blue whale, holder so far of this record with a specimen of 190 tons.
Perucetus colossus, which can be translated as “colossal whale of Peru”, weighed between 85 and 340 tons, according to the study carried out by the National Museum of Natural History in Stuttgart, Germany, in collaboration in particular with scientists from the Universities of Bern and Zurich. The latter was published on Wednesday in Nature magazine.
The Perucetus colossus fossil was discovered in 2010 in a desert on the southern coast of Peru. Its age has been estimated at 39 million years. Each of its vertebrae weighs more than 100 kilos and its ribs reach 1.4 meters in length.
The weight of the 20-meter-long skeleton alone was estimated to be between five and eight tons. It is two to three times heavier than the 25-meter-long blue whale skeleton on display at London’s Natural History Museum, the authors point out.
Gigantic animals for a long time?
This work also suggests that whales became gigantic animals earlier than we thought, notes Eli Amson, paleontologist at the National Museum of Natural History in Stuttgart. This evolution would have taken place 40 million years ago, and not ten as previously assumed.
A total of thirteen gigantic vertebrae – one of which weighed almost 200 kilos – were found, along with four ribs and a hip bone. It took years and many trips to collect and prepare the fossils.
The team of Peruvian and European researchers also took time to figure out exactly what they were dealing with: a new species of basilosauridae, an extinct family of cetaceans. The fossils are now on display at the Natural History Museum in Lima, the Peruvian capital.
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