Fossil skull of largest whale ever discovered

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A newly described skull from early Pleistocene age (1.5 million years ago) remains found near the town of Matera, Italy, has been determined to belong to an ancient species of blue whale. The paper describing the skull suggests that the whale could have grown up to 85 feet (26 meters) long, just shy of the record 100 feet long that modern day blue whales can reach. The skull shows that whales of this size and length existed far earlier than previously thought, as it pushes back the probable date for massive body size increase from between 300,000 and 4.5 million years ago to between 3.6 and 6 million years ago, showing that the rise in giant body size was more gradual than previously thought. However, the study does suggest that, due to the difficulty in collecting, studying, and describing large whale fossils, the specimens we do have might distort the evolutionary history of whale body size. However, the authors are confident that several undescribed large whales of a similar age could solve this issue. The paper suggests that the increase in body size in whales may have originated from an increase in prey density resulting from upwellings of cold water from the depths as the global ocean temperature decreased, allowing whales to support a larger size. This find is significant because large whale fossils from the past 2.5 million years are extremely rare, likely due to the frequent ice ages during this time causing water to freeze into ice and sea levels to drop dramatically. Here is an image of the skull used in the study, a reconstruction of the living animal to show its scale with a modern diver, and a link to the paper describing it.




Paper (abstract only): https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsbl.2019.0175