Katherine
Kurowski
Guest Writer
Today’s beaked whales (Ziphiidae) dive hundreds of meters to chase after their prey: seafloor-living squids, fishes, and crustaceans. However, one remarkable fossil suggests an ancestral species of these whales found its food near the water’s surface.
In 2014, along the southwestern coast of Peru, palaeontologists Olivier Lambert and colleagues unearthed the skeletons of an ancient beaked whale, or ziphiid, and numerous sardine-like fishes preserved inside the whale’s chest and head area. The rocks entombing the fossilized remains of the whale, a specimen of Messapicetus gregarius, and fish, Sardinops sagax, accumulated as seafloor sediment in the Late Miocene age, nine to ten million years ago.
Lambert and colleagues described the fish’s scales as showing little to no signs of stomach acid exposure, suggesting the whale had gorged on these fish hours before dying and sinking to the seafloor. The fish skeletons in the head area may have been the ziphiid’s vomit.
