Three scientists, one with the College of Michigan and the other two with the College of Casablanca, have found a skull and a half-skeleton in Morocco that they recommend connecting with a few types of old whales. In their paper, distributed in the open access journal PLOS ONE, Philip Gingerich, Ayoub Amane, and Samir Zouhri depict the fossils and how they integrate the development of land-based animals that advanced into present-day whales.
The fossils found by the scientists were dated to roughly quite a while back (during the Eocene) and recognized as an individual from the Basilosaurid, a group of old whales that were land-based yet had different oceanic adaptations, like flippers. Earlier exploration has shown they lived around what is currently Africa, North America, and Europe.
In the end (over the resulting 5 million years), they advanced to become current whales. However, the researchers discovered differences in the fossils that connect a few types of whales that had a place with the animal species Antaecetus, such as Pachycetus paulsonii and Pachycetus wardii.The differences were so striking that we were able to obtain a fossil of its own kind, Antaecetus aithai.Its nearly small skull was the distinguishing feature that set it apart from the others.
The scientists note that individuals from the species were known to have thick, thick bones that allude to muscular structure, yet they additionally propose that they were moderately sluggish swimmers and not light-footed in the water. It has been speculated that since they were all the while developing from land creatures into ocean animals, it is reasonable to assume they had an enormous lung limit.
Taken together, such properties suggest the species would probably have invested the vast majority of its energy along the ocean floor near the shore. Also, they presumably would have seemed to be manatees rather than whales. One significant distinction between them and present-day manatees, the analysts note, would have been their eating routine.
Present-day manatees eat plants; Antae Cetus species would have been hunters, logically consuming sluggish, delicate-bodied animals living on or close to the ocean bed. Along these lines, they probably would have needed to get their prey through a snare instead of pursuing them down.
More information: Philip D. Gingerich et al, Skull and partial skeleton of a new pachycetine genus (Cetacea, Basilosauridae) from the Aridal Formation, Bartonian middle Eocene, of southwestern Morocco, PLOS ONE (2022). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0276110
Journal information: PLoS ONE
