GIZMODO | Fossil Hunters Found Bones From an Ancient Whale... and Then They Saw the Bite Marks
The research into these bones culminated in a paper published recently in the journal Palaeontologia Electronica: “Shark-cetacean trophic interactions during the late Pliocene in the Central Eastern Pacific (Panama).”
The authors determined that these bones belonged to a type of Balaenopterid, a genus of filter-feeding whales that includes today’s humpback and blue whales. Fin bones alone are not enough to determine the exact species or the size of the marine mammal, but these particular bones did offer tantalizing clues into the last moments of this animal.
“When we collected the whale fossils,” explained lead author Dirley Cortés, a paleobiologist at Redpath Museum, McGill University, “from the beginning we were really surprised about the giant size of the appendicular bones. After a while of inspection, we realized some of the bones had strange serrated marks across the surface, we came up with the excited hypothesis of shark bite marks, but it took us more time to actually confirm it.”