AP, ScienceInsider: Massed whale skeletons in Peru offer mystery, and a portal to the past
Late last week Chilean researchers and a team of fossil whale specialists from the Smithsonian Institution showed off to reporters a phenomenal bone bed containing remains of balleen whales millions of years old, plus at least one , extinct tusked dolphin and one sperm whale. Highway construction revealed them first, setting off an urgent effort to gather as much data and specimens as possible before road crews go back to work. Puzzles abound. Perhaps they got there in a mass stranding, or somehow accumulated over an extended period in some sort of lagoon trap. Now well back from shore, the site has some of the most perfectly preserved whale fossils ever seen, it says here. Remains of more than 75 whales have been counted so far.
The AP‘s Eva Vargara filed it from Santiago, and co-author Ian James pitched in from Caracas, Venezuela. Chilean press has been attentive too. At ScienceInsider, Carolyn Gramling does a nice job explaining some of the technical tools at work, including an elaborate laser scanning project to digitally preserve the bone bedin a sort of virtual in-situ tableau. The high-tech savvy of the scientific team is grasped at its direct outreach to the public, a series of blogposts compiled by the leader and members of the Smithsonian team. They include videos of the expedition and the tented studio built over one of the better-preserved skeletons for full digitization. These are worth a look, especially the time-lapse sequences that capture the frenzy. We thus see another chapter of the recurring struggle of scientists to grab what they can when a construction crew finds something. Those have to be mixed emotions – without the construction one wouldn’t even know about this or that relic or fossil. But the same bunch is hanging around with its backhoes and jackhammers, ready to reduce it all to gravel. At least this one let paleontologists in on it. The site is right next to a two land road being widened (see pic with brief account at The Inquisitr). One imagines that the original road crew’s foreman probably saw lots of huge bones too but told the heavy equipment operators to keep on keepin’ on.
The lines of dead whales to have a familiar look. For the latest on why, we have from Tasmania ….
Other, Pertinent News:
- AFP (Nov. 17): Last whale dies in mass Australian beaching ; Not pilot whales or porpoises, either. Sperm and minke whales.
- but we do have pilot whales – AFP – 61 whales die in New Zealand mass stranding ;
- Charlie Petit
