Paleontologists have unearthed the most complete fossilized whale skeleton ever discovered in Taiwan, dating back more than 85,000 years, National Cheng Kung University (NCKU) said yesterday.
The 15m-long fossil was found this summer in Pingtung County’s Hengchun Township (恆春) by a team led by Yang Tzu-ruei (楊子睿), an adjunct professor at the university’s Department of Earth Sciences and an assistant researcher at the National Museum of Natural Science.
It is the second large mammalian fossil discovered in Taiwan after the Hayasaka rhinoceros found in Tainan’s Zuojhen District (左鎮) in 1971, Yang said.
Photo courtesy of National Cheng Kung University
Yang directed a team of 16 academics from NCKU and the museum, as well as foreign experts and high-school students, in unearthing the fossil.
The discovery could have implications for our understanding of how whales have adapted to environmental changes since the Ice Age, Yang said.
More than 70 percent of the whale — including the scapula, upper and lower jaw bones, and tail vertebrae — are all well preserved, he said, adding that although only the back of the skull is intact, the skeleton is still considered complete.
Judging from the shape of the scapula, Yang said the fossil could be of a blue or humpback whale from the Late Pleistocene period more than 85,000 years ago, both of which have been discovered beached in Taiwan.
Other paleontologists involved in the dig included Yao Chiou-ju (姚秋如), an assistant researcher in the museum’s biology section, and Anneke van Heteren, head of mammalogy at the Bavarian State Collection of Zoology in Germany.
Chou Wen-po (周文博), a student of archeology at NCKU who joined the excavation team, said that he and a local collector had gone to the Tougou (頭溝) area of Hungchun early this year to film a documentary.
They found many marine fossils there, including shells, crabs, sharks and whale fragments, he said, adding that he immediately went to Yang with their discovery.
In May, the team discovered four large rib bones protruding from the bottom of a deep river valley, he said.
The mandible of the whale — the heaviest of the bones, and part of the skull — is 223cm-long and weighs 334kg, Chou added.
The fossil has been safely moved to the museum, where researchers are cleaning and studying the bones, Yang said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching