Peruvian fossils yield a four-legged otterlike whale with hooves
The find is the oldest whale skeleton in the New World
An ancient four-legged whale walked across land on hooved toes and swam in the sea like an otter.
The newly discovered species turned up in 2011 in a cache of fossilized bones in Playa Media Luna, a dry coastal area of Peru. Jawbones and teeth pegged it as an ancient cetacean, a member of the whale family. And more bones followed.
“We were definitely surprised to find this type of whale in these layers, but the best surprise was its degree of completeness,” says Olivier Lambert, a paleontologist at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels.