Blue whales, move over. It could be that a new heavyweight champion is in town.
The fossilized vertebrae from the a Discovered ancient whaleResearchers report August 2, 2009 that the blue whale could have been heavier than modern ones. Nature. If this is true, then the extinct Whale would be known as the heaviest creature to ever exist.
The 39-million-year old behemoth Perucetus colossusCetaceans include modern whales, porpoises, and dolphins. Its bones were huge. P. colossus’ skeleton alone could have weighed about 5 to 7 metric tons, two to three times as much as a 25-meter-long blue whale’s skeleton does, the researchers estimate.
The fossils, which were found in southern Peru, were “clearly something exceptional from the first look,” says Eli Amson, a paleontologist at the State Museum of Natural History in Stuttgart, Germany. “You don’t move a vertebra like this by yourself.” Thirteen vertebrae were unearthed in total, each weighing over 100 kilograms, or more than a baby elephant.
Amson and his colleagues claim that such heavy bones are in line with the shallow diving lifestyle of coastal whales. For deep dives whales require a lighter body so that they can get back to air without having to work too hard. The massive bones are P. colossusCould have helped it hover in shallow depths by equalizing the upward buoyant force of the air in its lung.
Overall, P. colossusThe team estimates the weight could have ranged from 85 to 350 metric tons. That’s at least as much as a typical blue whale, and up to as much as eight passenger jets. But the animal’s true mass is difficult to determine from only fossils and would have also depended on the distribution and density of the creature’s soft tissues.
Scientists are skeptical about the claims of some scientists P. colossusThe upper limit of this mass range was possible. Without a fossil skull, it’s hard to know what P. colossus You could have eatenNicholas Pyenson, who did not take part in the study, is a paleontologist working at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Washington, D.C.SN: 12/12/19).
Amson is optimistic that the team can find a complete specimen of this whale in order to better understand its status as a heavyweight.
