A pair of Peregocetus hunt on the rocky coast of Peru. (Credit: A. Gennari) Whales evolved from hoofed, four-legged land walkers in south Asia more than 50 million years ago. Now researchers have unearthed the skeleton of an ancient four-legged whale in Peru. The discovery sheds light on how cetaceans dispersed from the Indo-Pakistan region to the Pacific Ocean. “The new find from Peru is the geologically oldest quadrupedal whale from the Americas, so it gives a minimum age [for] when they reached the New World,” said Olivier Lambert, a paleontologist at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels, who led the new research.
Lambert and an international team of researchers unearthed the ancient whale in Pisco Basin, a coastal desert region at the foot of the Andes in southwestern Peru. The researchers had searched for fossils of extinct marine mammals there before, but did not expect to ...
