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Scientists have unearthed fossils in a coastal desert of southern Peru of a four-legged whale that thrived both in the sea and on land about 43 million years ago in a discovery that illuminates a ...
Peregocetus is a genus of early whale that lived in what is now Peru during the Middle Eocene epoch. [1] [2] Its fossil was uncovered in 2011 in the Yumaque Member (Paracas Formation) of the Pisco Basin at Playa Media Luna by a team consisting of members from Belgium, Peru, France, Italy, and the Netherlands.
The earliest known ancestor of arctic whales is Denebola brachycephala from the late Miocene around 9–10 million years ago. [55] A single fossil from Baja California indicates the family once inhabited warmer waters. [27] [56] [57] Acrophyseter skull. Ancient sperm whales differ from modern sperm whales in tooth count and the shape of the ...
Archaeoceti ("ancient whales"), or Zeuglodontes in older literature, is a paraphyletic group of primitive cetaceans that lived from the Early Eocene to the late Oligocene 1] Representing the earliest cetacean radiation , they include the initial amphibious stages in cetacean evolution , thus are the ancestors of both modern cetacean suborders ...
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In contrast, the origin of cetaceans, which includes whales, began as four-legged land animals who actively used locomotion and were great runners as a result. [14] The fossils came out of red terrigenous sediments bounded largely by shallow marine deposits typical of coastal environments caused by the Tethys Ocean. [15]
Though the whale may have been primarily aquatic, the discovery of ankle bones lends to the idea that this fossil may have been a transition between sea-based and land-based mammals. While whales eventually returned to the sea, the anthracotheres , ancestors of the hippopotamus , are thought to have descended from an ancestor shared with the whale.
The family Balaenidae, the right whales, contains two genera and four species. All right whales have no ventral grooves; a distinctive head shape with a strongly arched, narrow rostrum, bowed lower jaw; lower lips that enfold the sides and front of the rostrum; and long, narrow, elastic baleen plates (up to nine times longer than wide) with fine baleen fringes.