at it offers such a clear window into the marine ecosystems and marine food webs of the Miocene. “I’m amazed at how comprehensive a snapshot it is,” he says. “We have a little bit of the familiar—baleen whales—and a little bit of the exotic—an extinct aquatic sloth and an extinct walrus whale. Yet in 240 meters of road cut we can sample fossil marine mammals that pretty much represents everything that we know of living in the ocean in South America at that time. That is what is compelling to me.”
The Cerro Ballena site also reveals just how full the oceans once were of whales, with some regions possibly even experiencing super-aggregations of whales, Pyenson says. “We don’t see baleen whale strandings like Cerro Ballena today. The issue is that today’s world has a shifted baseline because we nearly killed off all the baleen whales. They didn’t go extinct but we reduced their abundances by upwards of 95 percent. What was normal on Earth for hundreds and even thousands of years is no longer normal. So we are living in a very altered world today where baleen whales are not nearly as abundant as they used to be.”
Above: 3D digitization captured essential data about the arrangement and condition of the skeletons at Cerro Ballena before they were safely removed and deposited at the Museo Paleontologico de Caldera, a local natural history museum.
In addition, Pyenson says, the enormous wealth of fossils found at Cerro Ballena probably represent only a fraction of what is buried there. In fact, Pyenson adds, Cerro Ballena tells us that whale assemblages may actually be a lot more common in the fossil record than recognized and scientists might look elsewhere in the world in similar types of continental settings for other such assemblages of bones.–John Barrat
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