“Ancient Four-Legged Whale Unveiled: What Secrets Does This 40-Million-Year-Old Creature Hold?”
Additionally, this discovery, published in the journal Current Biology, makes it clear that ancient whales originally called South America — not North America — their first home in the Western Hemisphere.
G. Bianucci/Current BiologyThe ancient four-legged whale had a specific gait it used on land, as evidenced by its hip bones.
“We have known for a while that four-legged whales had made it to North America, but this is the first reliable record from South America and thus also the first from the Southern Hemisphere,” said Felix Marx, a paleontologist from the University of Liège in Belgium.
The species’ Latin name essentially denotes it was a “traveling whale that reached the Pacific.” Scientists were stunned to find shockingly well-preserved remains — including its jaw, front and hind legs, part of the spine, and tail — on Peru’s Playa Media Luna coast in 2011.
Researchers have since placed the species in the middle Eocene by dating the sediment in which the fossils were found.
“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,” explained lead author Olivier Lambert, a paleontologist at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences.
Similar to otters or beavers, the Peregocetus was highly capable of traversing both land and sea environments. Unlike those comparable animals, however, this particular whale was rather large — measuring in at around 13 feet long.
