A Nature journal study has concluded that a recent ancient whale discovery in Peru might have revealed the heaviest animal on record.
The extinct creature is estimated to have weighed 85 to 340 metric tons, which equates to 187,393 to 749,572 pounds.
Until this recent finding, blue whales were accepted as the animals with the greatest body mass. However, this newly discovered animal likely weighed two to three times more than the blue whale, which can be as heavy as 330,000 pounds.
The whale, thought to be around 39 million years old, has been named Perucetus colossus, with “Peru” highlighting its geographic origin, “cetus” being the Latin word for whale, and “kolossós” being the ancient Greek work for “large statue”.
While the researchers didn’t have Perucetus’s skull or teeth, the mammal’s remaining characteristics indicated that it likely fed near the bottom of the sea and was not an active predator as it wouldn’t have been able to chase fast-moving prey with its heavy skeleton. So it may have fed on plants or sought out small molluscs and crustaceans. It might have also scavenged for vertebrate carcasses.
The first Perucetus vertebra was found by a Peruvian palaeontologist named Mario Urbina Schmitt more than a decade ago. Excavations began soon after but it took experts several years to dig up the creature’s remains. This was because of how the fossil had been preserved at the core of a mountain, the mere size of the bones, and the challenging environmental conditions of the Ica desert.
Talking about the importance of the discovery, J G M Thewissen and David A Waugh, from the Northeast Ohio Medical University, who provided commentary on the study, said: “Discoveries of such extreme body forms are an opportunity to re-evaluate our understanding of animal evolution.
“It seems that we are only dimly aware of how astonishing whale form and function can be,” they added.
The Perucetus isn’t the only specimen found in the area. Researchers previously found Peregocetus pacificus, the most ancient quadrupedal cetacean to have reached the Pacific Ocean, as well as the earliest ancestor of the modern baleen whales, Mystacodon selenesis.
