Look out, blue whale: a new heavyweight contender has emerged. Based on a partial skeleton recovered in Peru, scientists believe a newly discovered whale that lived roughly 40 million years ago was the biggest mammal ever.
The contemporary blue whale has long been thought to be the largest and heaviest mammal ever, dwarfing all dinosaurs from the distant past.
According to a study published in the journal Nature, Perucetus colossus, the Peruvian enormous whale, may have been even heavier.
An international team of researchers calculated the animal’s average body mass to be 180 tonnes based on several huge bones discovered in the Peruvian desert.
That would not be enough to win the heavyweight belt on its own. According to Guinness World Records, the largest blue whale ever recorded weighed 190 tonnes.
However, the researchers determined that the ancient whale weighed between 85 and 340 tonnes, implying that it may have been much larger.
Mario Urbina, a palaeontologist who has spent decades combing the desert on Peru’s southern coast, discovered the first fossil of the ancient whale in 2010.
“There is no record of the existence of an animal as large as this, it is the first, that’s why nobody believed me when we discovered it,” Urbina told AFP in Lima.
According to the researcher, this discovery “is going to cause more questions than answers and give the rest of the palaeontologists a lot to talk about.”
The remains were shown to the public for the first time during a press conference at the Natural History Museum in Lima, Peru, where they are currently on display.
The researchers believe the beast was roughly 20 meters (65 feet) long.
