Stop what you're doing and look at this absolute unit of a whale 🐳 The Perucetus colossus lived 39 million years ago, weighed up to 340 tonnes, and it's thought to have been the heaviest animal to ever exist.
The animal is modelled from a partial skeleton, including 13 vertebrae, four ribs and one hip bone, all discovered in the south of the country. Discovered by a team from the University of Pisa and State Museum of Natural History Stuttgart in Germany led by Dr Eli Amson, the estimated complete skeletal mass is thought to be bigger than any animal ever known on land or sea.
The effect of such large bones on buoyancy suggests the whale lived in coastal waters, and may have led to its extinction at the end of the Eocene period when shallower environments became less productive. While life on Earth is believed to have originated in the sea, the ancestors of marine mammals first evolved on land, before returning underwater.
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