The Peruvian ancestor of the blue whale could be the heaviest animal in history, imagine an animal so big that it makes that blue whale, the supposedly largest creature that has ever existed on our planet, look like a small calf.
And it has been discovered in Latin America, specifically in Peru, this ancestor of the blue whale could be the heaviest animal that has ever existed. It is the marine mastodon nicknamed Peruceus colosus or colossal whale of Peru, its fossil remains were found in 2010 in a desert from the southern coast of the country by paleontologist Mario Urbina.
This is the fossil one of the most important fossils that have been discovered in Peruvian territory, it lived 39 million years ago and until now only 12 vertebrae and four ribs have been discovered, the work of collecting and preparing the bones took years and several expeditions so that the team of Peruvian and European scientists could confirm what they had found.
The bones found give indications that the weight of the ancient cetacean could vary from 85 to 340 tons, enough to dethrone the largest specimen of the blue whale that holds the Guinness record of 190 tons.
Using the skeleton of the animals, a progression was made to find out what the body mass could be, in all cases, this animal came out heavier than any of the estimates, it is a new species of Bacilosaurid, an already extinct family of terrestrial cetaceans that looked like small deer, over time they migrated to the sea to adapt to this change and to be able to save energy, these marine mammals began to fatten an evolutionary process known as gigantism.
As is characteristic of their class, they had a very small head with respect to their body, and this is going to give the rest of natural paleontologists a lot to talk about because of how to be able to interpret what it really was like.
This new discovery suggests that cetaceans reached their maximum weight 30 million years earlier than previously thought. The fossils are on display at the Natural History Museum in Lima.
This prehistoric giant was a krill filter feeder, a small species of crustacean that abounds in the oceans and this diet combined with its large size allowed it to consume huge amounts of krill in one bite and that gave it a lot of energy to maintain its enormous enormous size.
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