This extraordinary report on the BBC has me goggling.
Whale graveyard dating back five million years discovered
An enormous whale graveyard around 1,200km (745 miles) long has been discovered in the south-eastern Indian Ocean.
The site, which is 7km (four miles) deep, has been found in the Diamantina fracture zone, a range on the sea floor of ridges and trenches.
But it is the age of the remains - some from 5.3 million years ago - that has prompted huge excitement in the scientific community.
The underwater necropolis, which was discovered by a team of researchers from China, Italy and New Zealand, is teeming with organisms and species that "may be new to science", according to journal Nature.
One of the study's authors Xiaotong Peng of the Chinese Academy of Sciences said: "Discovering a necropolis of this scale was completely unexpected.
"The size of distribution, the depth and the age range were far beyond anything we had imagined."
During 32 dives to the site, explorers collected samples from 485 whale-fossil sites and active whale falls, and found a treasure trove of remains, including one extinct whale's skeleton.
The beaked Pterocetus benguelae, which is 5.3 million years old, was discovered to be one of the fossilised skulls in the graves.
A five-metre long Antarctic minke whale's carcass was the largest discovery made.
A new species which the team has called Pterocetus diamantinae, after the site, was also uncovered.
Jellyfish, worms and crustaceans are among the community of creatures living off the huge spread of carcasses.
"Peng and colleagues' encounter with a vast fossil graveyard is a truly unique discovery," Stephen J Godfrey of the Calvert Marine Museum wrote in Nature.
There's more at the link.
There's also this video report on the discovery.
How on earth did so many whale carcasses end up in such a relatively small area? Is it possible that some species of whale may deliberately go to that part of the sea to die, just as elephants were reputed to go to the "elephants' graveyard", a hidden valley where they lay down to die? The elephant myth has long since been refuted, but I'm willing to bet some will raise it again in connection with the whales.
This is absolutely fascinating. I daresay there are decades of research ahead in that area.
Peter
11 comments:
Would be a bummer to find out Star trek "save the whales" episode was oddly correct future reading.
A Not a Moon singing whale songs to extinct whales would be a real Alien Invasion :-)
As far as the African tale of Elephants graveyard it may have been true, but the locals found them and used the materials up.
Like the stories of why in Napoleonic Battlefields where many a man and horse were buried few are found.
SNIP 1. Mass graves emptied for fertilizer and sugar production
After the battle, many dead were buried in mass graves. However, these pits were systematically raided in the years following the conflict. In the 1830s, the booming sugar industry in Belgium began using animal bones — including those of soldiers — to make charcoal tablets for sugar syrup filtration. Similarly, bones were sold across Europe as bone meal fertilizer, a market that included Britain. Newspaper accounts from the 1820s and 1830s document the import of battlefield bones for this purpose.
History is often weird. Using grave bones for sugar production...
2. Bone meal as a valuable commodity
Bone meal was an effective fertilizer, and European battlefields were seen as a convenient, cheap source. Firsthand accounts from the 1820s describe wagons removing the dead and reports of mass graves containing up to 13,000 bodies The Telegraph. These graves were likely emptied by local farmers, traders, or “fertiliser salesmen” who removed bones for sale The Telegraph.
3. Other disposal methods
Some researchers also suggest that bones may have been burned on pyres or otherwise destroyed, making recovery impossible The Telegraph. In some cases, remains were simply left to decompose in the open field, especially in the immediate aftermath when burial was not prioritized.
4. Archaeological evidence
Despite the scale of the battle, only a handful of skeletons and a few amputated bones have been recovered to date The Telegraph. This absence is consistent with the theory that the majority of remains were removed or destroyed before modern archaeology could document them.
In summary: The few graves found at the Napoleonic battlefield are the result of a combination of hasty, incomplete burials and systematic looting of bones for industrial use, particularly in the sugar and fertilizer industries. This explains why the battlefield’s human remains are so scarce compared to other war sites.
Whales never accepted cremation. Hence the graveyards.
Five million year old bones just sitting on the sea floor - I call BS on this …
I wonder about the alleged time scale. Maybe they do know how to date bones. But how much do they know about dating bones which have been lying below 7,000 meters of sea water. Too, in the several millions of years they claim, what environmental changes do the bones show? How many examples are there of bones, from any species, dated that many years?
I do wonder how they will admit that their dating of tree rings, I mean whale bones were in error.
We tend to forget that academic research of this nature is possible only due to our modern technology and readily available energy sources. A major calamity could bring an end to such learning. Many academic endeavors are highly dependent on our level of technology. It's not just the our comfort which is dependent on tech and energy.
I might agree with it. But first I'd check the ocean topography and the currents. That section of the ocean may be a 'dead zone' and the dead bloated whale corpses may make their way there due to currents and such.
I have a hypothesis, but it's boring and simple, and so would be hated by the religiously zelous fruits and nuts who do whale research.
Weird ass people. I ONCE volunteered to put on a rubber gimp suit and Scott air pack to retreive a whale inner ear with an electric chainsaw from a decomposing Finback whale carcass. $150 was $150.
Beans is of my way of thinking. I'm guessing that in a tectonically active area, there's a fair chance the area was similar to places like Kick 'em Jenny in the caribbean, where every now and again gas releases and superheated water upwellings randomly occur. What remains is to see where the local carbonate compensation depth was back in the day.
Beans beat me to it. The winds/seas down there are 'nasty', called the Roaring 40s for a reason. And they blow from west to east year round, creating large wave and wind wave action also.
That popped up on my YouTube offerings. Yeah, kinda mind blowing. IIRC, some elephants go to a Spot to die.
Since whales are heavy creatures, they like to know just how heavy they are. So it could be a whale weigh station ...
OK, I'll get my coat and leave quietly.
Phil B
'Whale Cemetery' by Stephen King ?
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