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An Ancient Whale in the Peruvian Desert May Be the Heaviest Animal Ever

The extinct Perucetus colossus may have had a body mass of 85 to 340 metric tons, meeting or vastly outstripping that of the blue whale.

The undisputed heavyweight champion of the world may be facing a new challenger for the title. Paleontologists have unveiled the fossilized bones of a 39-million-year-old whale called Perucetus colossus, the only known remainder of an extinct species that may have weighed two to three times as much as the blue whale. A study describing the new whale, whose paddle-shaped tail and oblong body vaguely resemble that of a manatee, was published in the journal Nature on Wednesday. P. colossus is believed to have had a body mass of between 85 and 340 metric tons (while the blue whale clocks in at a shrimpy 190), and each of its 13 discovered vertebra weighs over 220 pounds. It was first excavated in the Peruvian desert in 2010 by paleontologist Mario Urbina, a co-author of the new study. “This is a weird and stupendous fossil, for sure,” Nicholas Pyenson, a Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History paleontologist not involved in the study, told The New York Times. “It’s clear from this discovery that there are so many other ways of being a whale that we have not yet discovered.”