Along the Coast of Peru, Scientists Discover an Ancient Whale With 4 Legs
Around 50 million years ago, whales began inching toward planet-wide colonization. At the time, reveals research published Thursday in Current Biology, they were small, hooved, legged, and land-locked animals living in South Asia — quite unlike the giant, streamlined humpbacks and bowheads we know today.
While scientists know that whales’ ancestors came from the sea onto land, then evolved to once again live in the sea, the exact details of that journey have been sparse. The new paper reveals an important piece of the puzzle: evidence of a four-legged whale that lived along the coast of Peru 42.6 million years ago. The international team named this newly identified species Peregocetus pacificus or “the traveling whale that reached the Pacific.”
This skeleton, dug out from the coastal desert Playa Media Luna, is the first indisputable record of a quadrupedal whale skeleton for the whole Pacific Ocean. Additionally, it’s the most complete skeleton found outside of India and Pakistan, and it is the oldest found yet in the Americas.
The excavation of the whale.
Appearance-wise, this whale did not look like the whales we have come to know. Like its ancestors in South Asia, it still had small hooves, which indicate that it was still capable of standing and even walking on land. Bones in its tail are reminiscent of beavers’ and otters’ tails, suggesting that the body part was essential to its swimming capabilities. Overall, the ancient animal was four meters long, and the physical evidence suggests it possessed locomotion abilities that enabled it to travel great distances.
This specimen’s existence also demonstrates that four-legged whales were able to cross the South Atlantic Ocean and disperse as far as the Pacific Ocean — all while retaining functional, weight-bearing limbs — less than 20 million years after their origin. The scientists believe that its descendants later and gradually migrated both farther northandsouth, until whales reached a truly global distribution.
The journey scientists think whales took to get to Peru.
While the journey is still impressive — from South Asia, to the western coast of Africa, to South America — researchers say that was in part possible because the distance between the latter two continents was half what it is today. This ancient whale also would have been assisted by westward surface currents, which pushed it onward as it swam.
Today, all cetaceans — whales, dolphins, and porpoises — are descendants of these four-legged colonizers. Even the earliest fully aquatic whales still wore visual reminders of their past, little external hindlimbs that streamed behind them uselessly. In modern times, scientists still occasionally discover a living whale with the vestiges of small hindlimbs hiding inside its body wall.
Retrieved from Inverse on Apr. 5, 2019. Sarah Sloat. "Along the Coast of Peru, Scientists Discover an Ancient Whale With 4 Legs"
Share
Medical research
Medical
Fleming Research Institute of Life Sciences will...
