The man who discovered ‘the heaviest animal in history’ – 9/3/2023 – Science

16 years ago, Mario Urbina was traveling with a friend in a pickup truck through the Ocucaje desert in Ica, in southern Peru. It was when they passed a rocky hill that caught his eye.

Urbina asked the driver to approach the scene, but he refused. He then asked me to let him out of the vehicle and go alone.

The driver again refused, causing Urbina to climb out the window and walk up the hill – as he says in an interview with BBC News Mundo, the BBC’s Spanish-language service.

Upon arriving at the site, he found “a pink stone” that, in fact, was a vertebra of the already famous percetus colossus —a cetacean that lived about 39 million years ago in the sea in what is now Peru. With an estimated body mass of around 200 tons, it may have been the heaviest animal ever, dwarfing even the blue whale.

In recent years, Urbina —now 61 years old— and a team from the Department of Vertebrate Paleontology at the Museum of Natural History at the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos de Lima, in Peru, unearthed 13 vertebrae, four ribs and a bone from the pelvis of that basilosaurus. It is estimated that the animal was 17 to 20 meters long.

Urbina made the discovery without ever having studied paleontology.

In fact, he started in the profession on an amateur basis in the 1980s and became “in love with fossils”, according to him. And, at the beginning of August, an article published by the renowned scientific journal Nature about the prehistoric Peruvian cetacean reached all parts of the world.

BBC News Mundo spoke with Mario Urbina about his work and the fascinating discovery of perucetus colossus. This is the interview.

Why was the discovery of this prehistoric animal so extraordinary?

It was one of my strangest discoveries.

The vertebra had a typical bone color of the time. [Eoceno médio, 39 milhões de anos atrás]but it was also too big.

This animal is extraordinarily large for its time and there is no record of animals of this size. To load each vertebra, six people are needed.

When I found it, I knew there weren’t any big animals like this one. So I knew it was a great discovery.

Also, the bone has no pores, it looks like a rock, it looks like marble. This made no one believe me.

That’s why I say it’s the equivalent of finding Godzilla. It took me four years to convince the scientific community that this animal existed. And I’ve been digging for six years.

If the discovery is so extraordinary, why did you say that it also brought misfortune?

She brought me financial doom. For the past four months I have eaten fried bananas because I lost so much money digging.

The last two times I went [ao lugar da escavação], I did not find a single bone, not a splinter of that animal. And that is money wasted. They blindly believe me, but sometimes I’m also wrong and I lose money.

But how perucetusyou never thought you were wrong, you were sure from the beginning that you had found something unique.

Yes yes. Now, why haven’t they found it in other parts of the world?

I don’t know. Why?

Because maybe it was endemic to Peru.

And why would it be endemic to the region [Ocucaje]?

The region is a mountain range that runs parallel to the coast and the sea enters the continent, flooding an entire valley between the mountains.

Animals took advantage of Ocucaje due to these conditions. It was closed to the open sea by a chain of mountains, formed large lagoons with calm and shallow waters and there were no currents or strong tides.

Sardine migrations entered this valley because there was plenty of food.

They were ideal places to have puppies or meet a mate. It was a grand hotel for all the Pacific fauna. Now, it’s my office.

How much time do you spend there?

I don’t count the time. Every time I go to the desert, I lose track of the days, what year it is. I come back and everyone around here has aged.

And what do you look for when you are in the desert?

I’m an expert on the Cenozoic (era that started about 66 million years ago) of all marine animals. Whether they are invertebrates or whales. I rescue them all and I adore them all.

And we do a previous work of geology. The career is multidisciplinary. It’s not that I pick up the rock and take it home. I bring the geologists and, with all of them, I define the position of the fossils and publish [o estudo].

It is necessary to know when this unfortunate fell dead [animal]. For that, I need a whole study of the geological layers. This takes years.

Who finances all this?

I became famous for saying that I don’t want money from the state. I prefer to ask for money from private individuals and I demand that private individuals finance the research. Otherwise, it would be like asking the State for money to play in the casino.

Anthropology is risk. Looking for a fossil is risky. There are people who walk for 30 years and find nothing.

And it’s not just the excavations, which are made in rocks and not in soft earth. Afterwards, it is necessary to clean and transport the fossils. It takes months to clean up a fossil.

For all this I need to look for money. I spend a lot of other people’s money, but not the state’s. And now, the State has its best ambassador and, for him, it’s free. The whole world is talking about Peru because of this fossil.

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How was the percetus colossus?

• He lived about 39 million years ago.
• Average of 17 to 20 meters.
• Its total weight was about 200 tons.
• He weighed from 5.3 to 7.6 tons of bone mass alone.
• Each vertebra weighed more than 100 kg.

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Because it’s the most important thing, right? That is to say, he is more extraordinary than the four-legged whale [a descoberta anterior de Urbina].

No. I do not classify my finds by this (age or size).

This one is more important because it made Peruvians unite over a pile of bones that doesn’t even have a skull. I didn’t even dream of that.

I bet he would be spectacular for the scientific world. But I didn’t think Peruvians would go crazy about it.

The fossil reflects a little of what Peru is, unique, big, mysterious, controversial.

People say to me “how beautiful the fossil is”. I hate him.

Why? What problems is it causing?

When I found it, I could climb the hill. He is on a vertical wall, of a hill that can be 18 meters high, of rock solid as cement.

Now, I can’t even get to the fossil. They have to carry me, because I’m ashamed, my legs can’t go up anymore (Urbina walks with the aid of a cane). I don’t have teeth.

Do you know how many times I’ve fallen off the hill? It’s vertical. We had to hire an excavator to make a ramp.

But you say it was worth it.

For me, the best payment is when the children come, holding out their hands. Thank you all for recognizing me.

How do you feel about this popularity brought by perucetus?

I can’t shave because, if I shave, they don’t recognize me (laughs).

I like the amount of children that have been bringing their parents and the parents bringing their grandparents.

With this curiosity that you aroused, what else is missing about the animal?

Check if he was a herbivore or if he had a dual diet. It’s a mystery. First let me find the head and teeth.

I don’t like to speculate. My colleagues did a study of how much it might have measured, but what if the missing bones change size? What happens if you change the size of the vertebrae?

You can no longer do the same calculation. But it was gigantic, it was gigantic.

What would be the next steps in the research?

For me to put on weight, because I am very weak. I’m a disaster.

I want to forget about the desert for a few months, but I’ll have to go back. If he was fat, he would have come back by now.

To look for the head of perucetus?

I can’t imagine the head is there, that’s a coincidence. That’s already lucky.

But I know I have to keep going until I’m convinced there’s no more [ossos].

This text was originally published here.