Ancient giant whale ate whales less

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Древний гигантский кит съел китов поменьшеThe body length of the whale was up to 21 meters.

Scientists have discovered the remains of the extinct whale Dorudon atrox species inside a huge ancient whale Basilosaurus Isis.

15-foot skeleton of Basilosaurus Isis have been found in 2010, surrounded by skeletons of sharks, other fish and skeletons of the smaller species of ancient whales Dorudon Atrox.

The remains were discovered in Wadi al-Hitane, which in Arabic means “Whale valley”, southwest of Cairo in Egypt. It is a world heritage site due to the large number of amazing fossils of ancient whales found in the area. Although the valley is now dry, in the Eocene it was a shallow sea, inhabited by various sea creatures. The fossils are also usually not hard to find – sometimes the dice are on the surface.

It turns out that these samples are not just to be close to each other – smaller remains were actually the prey of basilosaurus. This huge beast lived between 34 and 38 million years ago, was found the samples that had a whopping 15-18 meters in length. For comparison, modern orcas have a length of 5-7 meters, and humpback whales is between 13 and 16 meters.

“He Basilosaurus Isis had a long face and was armed with a pointy sharp incisors and cheek teeth,” said live Live Science the study’s lead author Manija Voss, a researcher of marine mammals in the Berlin Museum of nature.

Initially it was difficult to tell whether basilosaurus a scavenger or a predator on its prey. But a new study of small skeletons dorodnov in this area gave a clear and terrifying conclusion. In Wadi al-Hitane all the skeletons of basilosaurus was older, but about half dorodnov were cubs. Finally, the bones of the skull dorudon had bite marks.

The authors believe that the traces of fractures of the bones of fish and dorodnov and teeth marks on the skulls and other bones indicate that these animals became the food of basilosaurus who hunted them, not scavengers. Himself basilosaurus, judging by the wear on his teeth, was an adult and maybe even pretty old.

“These observations led to the idea that the shallow sea late Eocene, covering what is now the Wadi-al-Hitana was the area where dorudon were born, and, in this regard, a feeding area for predatory basilosaurus”, – authors of the study from the University of Michigan.

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