this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2024
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
“The numbers don’t make any sense,” said Nicholas Pyenson, a paleontologist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History and one of the authors of the new study.
In their new analysis, Dr. Pyenson and Ryosuke Motani, a paleontologist at the University of California, Davis, concluded that Perucetus probably weighed 60 to 70 tons, which would have made it about the size of a sperm whale.
Dr. Urbina and his colleagues reconstructed the full skeleton of Perucetus by studying the much smaller whales that lived at the same time.
They also drew inspiration from living manatees, which have dense skeletons that let them stay underwater to graze on sea grass.
Eli Amson, an expert on bone tissue at the State Museum of Natural History in Stuttgart, Germany and an author on the original study, disagreed with the new approach.
They are finding that Perucetus was even more manatee-like than they originally believed, strengthening their conclusion that it rivaled or surpassed the blue whale in weight, he said.
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