Amphibious Whale That Could Both Swim And Walk On Land – Peru Discovery

Eddie Gonzales Jr. – MessageToEagle.com – Researchers discovered an ancient four-legged whale in 42.6-million-year-old marine sediments along the coast of Peru.

Cetaceans, the group including whales and dolphins, originated in south Asia more than 50 million years ago from a small, four-legged, hoofed ancestor.

Artistic reconstruction of two individuals of Peregocetus, one standing along the rocky shore of nowadays Peru and the other preying upon sparid fish. The presence of a tail fluke remains hypothetical. Credit: A. Gennari

They had small hooves at the tip of the whale’s fingers and toes and its hip and limbs morphology so it’s possible this whale could walk on land.

Its other anatomical features like the tail and feet, including long, likely webbed appendages, similar to an otter, indicate that it was a good swimmer too.

“This is the first indisputable record of a quadrupedal whale skeleton for the whole Pacific Ocean, probably the oldest for the Americas, and the most complete outside India and Pakistan,” Olivier Lambert of the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, according to a paper.

The place of this discovery is the coastal desert of southern Peru, named Playa Media Luna, where researchers from Peru, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and Belgium, where fossil digging took place in 2011.

The remains of the ancient four-legged whale were named “Peregocetus pacificus” by researchers. The name means “the traveling whale that reached the Pacific.”

“When digging around the outcropping bones, we quickly realized that this was the skeleton of a quadrupedal whale, with both forelimbs and hind limbs,” Lambert says.

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The team analyzed the whale’s fossil and dated it to 42.6 million years ago. The animal was capable of maneuvering its large body (up to 4 meters long, tail included), both on land and in the water.

There is now a strong support for the hypothesis that this kind of animals  reached North and South America across the South Atlantic, from the western coast of Africa.

The researchers suggest that after having reached South America, the amphibious whales migrated northward, finally reaching North America.

“We will keep searching in localities with layers as ancient, and even more ancient, than the ones of Playa Media Luna, so older amphibious cetaceans may be discovered in the future,” Lambert says.

Written by Eddie Gonzales Jr. – MessageToEagle.com Staff Writer