Largest whale ‘graveyard’ discovered, with skeletons spanning 5 million years

Chinese scientists have discovered the largest whale “graveyard” ever found. It contains nearly 500 whale skeletons all collected by chance and spreads across 750 miles of seafloor and five million years of evolutionary history.

“They’ve really captured something novel,” says Nick Pyenson, a paleontologist at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, who was not involved in the new research. The discovery is detailed in a study published today in Nature. “It’s a cool study; it’s really neat to see,” Pyenson says.

The discovery is centered on the Diamantina Fracture Zone, which travels west from the southwesternmost tip of Australia into the Indian Ocean along a rift valley that formed some 50 million years ago, when the Down Under continent split from Antarctica.

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In early 2023 Chinese scientists used a crewed submersible vehicle to scout along the fracture and spotted what they quickly realized was a whale fossil at some 23,000 feet (7,000 meters) below the surface. Over the course of some 30 additional dives, the researchers discovered an incredible array of whale remains, as well as traces of the animals’ activity at most of the sites they explored.

Five of the whale skeletons they found were recent enough to be hosting the type of dynamic ecosystem that scientists associate with “whale falls.” Such systems support a shifting cast of scavengers and then microbes specialized to these fleeting feasts. (Because scientists only discovered whale falls less than 50 years ago, Pyenson says that researchers don’t have an accurate estimate for how long these pop-up ecosystems can last.)

In the Diamantina zone, all five of the whale falls the scientists found were in the later stages of being consumed, with the bones fully exposed and host to teeming microbial communities. The researchers also observed animals ranging from bone-eating worms to squat lobsters, from spoon worms to jellyfish—and the scientists suspect that some of these creatures may represent undescribed species.

These tantalizing observations only scratch the surface of this discovery. Perhaps more interesting still are the hundreds of barren whale remains that the researchers saw during their dives. In these cases, the whale bones managed to fossilize before scavengers and microbes could demolish the massive carcasses. And because sediment accumulates so slowly at these depths, the fossils have remained exposed for thousands or even millions of years.

The researchers were able to use their submersible to collect 33 samples of the fossils, which were dated to between 5.26 million and 120,000 years old—a stunning range, Pyenson says. For him, the site is the marine equivalent of the famous La Brea Tar Pits in downtown Los Angeles, a site that has gathered and preserved carcasses over a range of geological time.

The “paper reminded me of a trailer for the first in a series of epic movies,” wrote Stephen Godfrey, a paleontologist at the Calvert Marine Museum, who was not involved in the finding, in a piece accompanying the paper that was also published in Nature. “I hope that there will be many more of these blockbusters to come.”

“It shouldn’t be surprising that we find this kind of site,” Pyenson says. “What they’re documenting here is probably not unique.” He believes it might be possible to find similarly massive numbers of whale remains along common migration “superhighways”—at least those routes that have remained more or less stable over millions of years.

“That’s what’s really cool,” Pyenson says. “It really underscores the value of protecting and better understanding these deep-sea environments.”