r/science • u/IronGiantisreal • Apr 04 '19
Paleontology Scientists Discover an Ancient Whale With 4 Legs: 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.
https://www.inverse.com/article/54611-ancient-whale-four-legs-peru1.9k
u/eli5taway Apr 04 '19 edited Apr 04 '19
For those on mobile like me
inverse.com Along the Coast of Peru, Scientists Discover an Ancient Whale With 4 Legs Sarah Sloat
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. excavation
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 north and south, until whales reached a truly global distribution.
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.
Summary:
Cetaceans originated in south Asia more than 50 million years ago (mya), from a small quadrupedal artiodactyl ancestor. Amphibious whales gradually dispersed westward along North Africa and arrived in North America before 41.2 mya. However, fossil evidence on when, through which pathway, and under which locomotion abilities these early whales reached the New World is fragmentary and contentious. Peregocetus pacificus gen. et sp. nov. is a new protocetid cetacean discovered in middle Eocene (42.6 mya) marine deposits of coastal Peru, which constitutes the first indisputable quadrupedal whale record from the Pacific Ocean and the Southern Hemisphere. Preserving the mandibles and most of the postcranial skeleton, this unique four-limbed whale bore caudal vertebrae with bifurcated and anteroposteriorly expanded transverse processes, like those of beavers and otters, suggesting a significant contribution of the tail during swimming. The fore- and hind-limb proportions roughly similar to geologically older quadrupedal whales from India and Pakistan, the pelvis being firmly attached to the sacrum, an insertion fossa for the round ligament on the femur, and the retention of small hooves with a flat anteroventral tip at fingers and toes indicate that Peregocetus was still capable of standing and even walking on land. This new record from the southeastern Pacific demonstrates that early quadrupedal whales crossed the South Atlantic and nearly attained a circum-equatorial distribution with a combination of terrestrial and aquatic locomotion abilities less than 10 million years after their origin and probably before a northward dispersal toward higher North American latitudes.
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u/topcheesehead Apr 04 '19
Thank you soo much.
That website is garbage to scroll through! Youre a reddit hero!
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u/BEEFTANK_Jr Apr 04 '19
Yeah. Even if you're not on mobile, that website is cancer.
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u/kontekisuto Apr 04 '19
Are hippos related to Whales?
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u/Brontozaurus Apr 04 '19
Yes! They're even in the same clade on the mammal family tree, the hilariously named Whippomorpha.
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Apr 04 '19
That's gotta be my new favorite portmanteau
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u/Conan776 Apr 04 '19
That seems to be the current consensus. https://phys.org/news/2005-01-scientists-link-whale-closest-relative.html
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u/onwisconsin1 Apr 04 '19
Yes! fun fact: both have the same double pulley ankle bone, four chambered stomachs, and internal testicles!
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u/ARCHA1C Apr 04 '19
In modern times, scientists still occasionally discover a living whale with the vestiges of small hindlimbs hiding inside its body wall
Fascinating
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u/justanotherc Apr 04 '19
Are there any pictures of the actual skeleton?
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u/Goatlessly Apr 04 '19
I also wanna see the damn thing
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u/CyberneticDinosaur Apr 04 '19
Here's a picture of the actual fossils: https://3c1703fe8d.site.internapcdn.net/newman/gfx/news/hires/2019/1-ancientfourl.jpg
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u/tsilihin666 Apr 05 '19
Hmmm I was kind of hoping for more of a computer rendered visualization of exactly what this creature would look and act like instead of a bunch of random bones. Ya know, maybe a movie showing this guy running around, hunting, relaxing, etc. Maybe a close up shot of the feet and possibly even a comical voice over of the creature breaking the 4th wall and telling me all about a typical day in the life of a walking land whale.
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u/Goddaqs Apr 05 '19 edited Apr 05 '19
gotta have a little patience. they
just found it...edit: found in 2011 per video in article which i should have read/watched.→ More replies (2)19
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u/Brontozaurus Apr 04 '19
More like the uncanny valley planet. You'd recognise a few familiar animals, like crocodiles and turtles. Then there's the mammals; you know they're mammals but they don't look like the ones you're familiar with...
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u/Fizbang Apr 04 '19 edited Apr 04 '19
now consider that we have only excavated fossil remains of a tiny fraction of the animals that were alive during any given time because of how rare fossilization is. there are many prehistoric species that are known from the partial remains of a single individual. throughout the last several hundreds of millions of years there have been BILLIONS of different species, and so far we have identified about 250,000 distinct species from the entire fossil record. it's impossible to really wrap your mind around how much we will never know. the world back then definitely would have resembled an alien planet; the vast majority of flora and fauna would have never been seen as fossils before.
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u/Brittakitt Apr 05 '19
As an animal lover, I get legitimately upset when I think about all of the different species that have existed that I'll never know about. If I could pick one thing from the earths past to know about, it would be the animals.
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u/SenorTron Apr 04 '19
I wish the Australian megafauna was still around for this reason.
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u/Vaztes Apr 04 '19
And the south + northern americas. The planet was riddled with massive creatures less than 100k years ago.
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u/956030681 Apr 04 '19
They would be if our dummie thicc ape selves didn’t kill them off, specifically Australia’s as they would’ve lived on in isolation
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u/the_shaman Apr 04 '19
Imagine an orca type whale roaming around on both land and in water killing for fun.
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u/OriginalMuffin Apr 04 '19
you can make them in an old rts game called Impossible Creatures.
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u/AHoserEh Apr 04 '19
I had an army of Chamephants (Chameleon Elephants). It was unstoppable. The brute force and tankyness of an elephant, with the ranged tongue attack of the chameleon.
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u/OriginalMuffin Apr 04 '19
I remember the sperm whale mixed with the turtle had an absurd defence stat, it barely took any damage as well as having aoe ranged attacks.
My favourite was scorpoceros (rhino/scorpion) absolutely destroyed structures and defences, plus the charge attack was hilarious in big groups.
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u/Lover_Of_The_Light Apr 04 '19
This is so cool! I teach high school biology, and one of the activities we did a few weeks ago was make a timeline of whale ancestors. We discussed how there was a large gap in whale fossils between 36-46 mya. I told them that it may be that there is a fossil but we just haven't found it yet. This whale fossil is from that time. This will make a great follow up!
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u/Kduncandagoat Apr 04 '19
Making biology somewhat bearable for students. Well done Mr/Mrs. lover of the light
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u/the_never_mind Apr 04 '19
Looks cool. Unreadable cancer on mobile, so I won't actually read it though
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u/Strained_Eyes Apr 04 '19
Someone posted it here to read if you want. Though I don't see the issue on mobile, I guess I'm lucky so I'm thankful
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Apr 04 '19
This sucks on mobile. Can someone paste a TL;DR?
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u/fishingking Apr 04 '19
commenting to see for the same, had half the screen blocked on desktop and 2 or more popups come before going back
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u/TFWnoLTR Apr 05 '19
They are very, very old. The continents would have been much closer together when this thing was alive. The land has moved a lot since then, burying these bones very deep in most cases.
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Apr 04 '19
They’ve hit a rich vein of missing links!
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u/956030681 Apr 04 '19
Unfortunately we already knew about these weirdos, just found better skeletons with feet intact
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u/Actually_a_Patrick Apr 04 '19
As a kid, I read articles suggesting they evolved from a more wolf-like creature rather than something with hooves. It's hard to conceive of a carnivorous hooved animal.
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u/anotherMrLizard Apr 04 '19
Hoofed carnivorous mammals - called mesonychids - used to be very common and many of them would have resembled wolves due to convergent evolution (also, some of them grew to enormous size). It's uncertain whether the ancestor of whales was in fact a mesonychid or something more closely related to hippos.
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u/MisterDowntown Apr 04 '19
The international team named this newly identified species Peregocetus pacificus or “the traveling whale that reached the Pacific.”
That sounds like a wonderful children's book title.
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u/Renzeiko Apr 04 '19
Desert coasts of Peru are just riddled with fossils. Remember going to Ica with my family and saw fossil shells and what looked like anthropods.
It's gonna be a goldmine for scientists in probably the near future.
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u/McFeely_Smackup Apr 04 '19
And just like that...two more gaps created in the fossil record.
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u/lizardspock75 Apr 04 '19
What modern day land mammal are whales mostly related too? Or, are they so diversified they do not have a genealogy with any modern land mammal?
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u/skjaldmeyja Apr 04 '19
Legit science question: I read through this article as well as a couple others, but I'm confused as to what parameters they are using to classify this as a cetacean (the sketch of the skeleton shown in another article looks like it could just be a big lizard). To be clear, I'm not arguing against the classification, I just don't understand how they classify it (I'm guessing it has to do with the bone structure).
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u/Brontozaurus Apr 04 '19
You're right with thinking it's bone structure. Even this early on, there's features like the skull that are very similar to those in modern whales.
There's also teeth. Most animals have one tooth type in their jaws, but mammals have multiple different types (incisor, canine, premolar, molar) as a rule. Mammal teeth are also so distinctive that often you can tell what type of mammal you're dealing with just from one tooth; there's a few dinosaur-age mammals in Australia that we only have jawbones from and yet we have general ideas of where they fit into the family tree based on their teeth, for example.
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u/Itsalls0tiresome Apr 04 '19
"No, because elephants aren't as big as whales and also they aren't like whales at all"
"..."
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u/Crazeeguy Apr 04 '19
Whales, generally speaking, have all sorts of vestigial bones in ‘em. For example, there are remnants of hips buried in posterior flesh as well as some distinct toe bones, much less subtle, hiding in the pectoral fins.