nautacea

Result from the Pisco Formation, please leave all your angry comments below! The Miocene of the Pisco basin is an absolute insane hot spot for marine life, over the course of millions of years the sediments recorded dozens of large mammals, especially whales...

which are often times recorded in astonishing details. Because of this abundance of megfauna, it became necessary to narrow it down for this piece. We went with the Sud Sacaco locality which records life of a large bay, making it possible to include some coastal and benthic...

species, importantly the sloth Thalassocnus and the whale Odobenocetops. Nowadays the Pisco basin shows little of this former biodiversity, being largely desert with many specimens laying on, or just below the surface. This makes it easy to spot them but the high levels of...

erosion also means we are losing many fossils to the elements. And of course that means that small stuff is lost quicker than big whales. Subsequently, and because of other reasons, small stuff from here is little understood while...

when you look at the 1m+ animals you are getting swarmed by fantastical creatures. Weirdly enough, you will notice that Livyatan is in our size chart but it's actually not in the piece and it would not be in the locality, not just geographically but also temporary...

FIRST-EVER VIDEO EVIDENCE CONFIRMS HEADBUTTING IN SPERM WHALES

Researchers have documented sperm whales headbutting each other using drone footage, confirming a behavior long speculated about from 19th-century whaling accounts. The study recorded three observations in the Azores and Balearic Islands where sub-adult whales collided at speeds up to 3.6 m/s, generating forces of approximately 200 kN. The individuals involved were younger whales, not the massive adult males previously hypothesized to engage in such contests.

These findings challenge previous skepticism that headbutting would risk damaging the whales' complex sound-producing anatomy. The behavior may function as rough play for practicing adult competition or play a role in social dynamics, such as the dispersal of maturing males from their natal groups. The opportunistic drone observations suggest such near-surface behaviors may be more common than previously recognized.

Gif: Headbutting behavior between two juvenile sperm whales. 4x speed. Full video here