Mysterious whale graveyard unearthed in Chilean desert

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Mysterious Whale Graveyard Unearthed in Chilean Desert

Published November 20, 2011
Fox News Latino​

More photos:
http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/news/2011/11/20/whales-in-desert-fossil-bonanza-poses-mystery/

Chilean scientists together with researchers from the Smithsonian Institution have begun to unearth one of the world's best preserved graveyards of prehistoric whales in the hopes of finding out how these bus sized animals wound up in the same corner of the Atacama Desert in Chile.​

More than 2 million years ago, scores of whales congregating off the Pacific Coast of South America mysteriously met their end.​

Maybe they became disoriented and beached themselves. Maybe they were trapped in a lagoon by a landslide or a storm. Maybe they died there over a period of a few millennia. But somehow, they ended up right next to one another, many just meters (yards) apart, entombed as the shallow sea floor was driven upward by geological forces and transformed into the driest place on the planet.​

Today, the whales have emerged again atop a desert hill more than a kilometer (half a mile) from the surf.​

Read more: http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/ne...t-fossil-bonanza-poses-mystery/#ixzz1eM0cNIrT​