Ocean's Deep Graveyard: 500-Whale Necropolis Reveals Deep-Sea Evolution
Scientists exploring the Diamantina Fracture Zone in the Indian Ocean documented about 485 whale‑fall sites across a 1,200 km stretch, including 476 fossilized whales and five active whale‑fall ecosystems, some skulls dating to ~5.26–5.3 million years ago. The find, described in Nature, is the largest, deepest whale graveyard yet and acts as a living archive of beaked whale evolution, while showing that deep‑sea ecosystems can thrive around whale falls via chemosynthetic microbial communities, Osedax worms, and other life concentrated around these carcasses.