the Elections Peregocetus lived about 43 million years ago and could be over 4 metres long. The fossils that are now found off the coast of Peru show that the species has not yet been developed fully for the havsexistens today’s whales live in.
indicates that the mammal could carry up the heavy body of the country. The robust tail and the simhudsbeklädda paws makes scientists believe that the elections were a strong swimmer.
– We believe that it was looking for food in water, and that movement under the water was much better than on land, ” says the belgian paleontologist Olivier Lambert, who led the study, published in Current Biology, TT.
To today’s whales and dolphins are descended from four-legged animals will not as a novelty, previous archaeological finds have shown that the whales evolved a little over 50 million years ago in Pakistan and in India, and that they probably evolved from terrestrial animals that were distantly related to the hippo.
to be roughly contemporary with the copies of the four-legged whales found in Asia. But it gives researchers a far more close picture of the cetacean evolutionskedja
– Previous copies from this time period have been more fragmentary and less complete. We had no clear picture of their ability to swim or walk, ” says researcher Olivier Lambert to the uk’s The Guardian.
Researchers believe that the first four-legged whales in Peru is not developed there, but that they instead managed to get to the South american coastline with the help of the near-surface ocean currents, and of the fact that the continents were half as far from each other at the time.
” Whales are the location of the example of evolution. They went from being a small hovbeklätt mammals to today’s blue whale. It is so interesting to see how they conquered the seas, ” says Travis Park, who is an expert on prehistoric whales at the Natural History Museum in London, to the uk’s The Guardian.
their entire lives in water is estimated by scholars to have been around 41 to 35 million years ago. Then they filled out an ecological void left after the last marine reptiles, died out along with the dinosaurs, about 66 million years ago, the magazine writes.
Fossilfyndet was discovered by a team of researchers with members from Peru, France, the Netherlands and Belgium and was dug up in 2011. The researchers ‘ findings were published Thursday in the scientific journal Current Biology.