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Post by Infinity Blade on Jul 12, 2016 8:23:38 GMT 5
Just in case some don't know, whale falls are whale carcasses that sink to deep water communities and sustain organisms that live there for decades.
But obviously whales didn't always exist. Therefore, do you think something similar could have happened with Mesozoic marine reptiles or even animals that lived before them?
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Jul 12, 2016 10:32:24 GMT 5
It's pretty certain, it's not like there's some magical barrier preventing large marine noncetacean animals from sinking beneath the mesopelagic zone. The thing is, we have no actual way of finding out which fossils were once fall carcasses and which weren't.
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Post by theropod on Jul 12, 2016 14:12:58 GMT 5
^Not really, sedimentology can certainly provide us with some insights into where the deposition took place…
I think it’s rather a problem of preservation of fossils deposited in actual deep-sea environments (if that’s what he meant by deep water), there are all kinds of reasons why most marine fossil assemblages are from shallow-water facies.
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Post by Infinity Blade on Jul 13, 2016 1:33:45 GMT 5
Yes, that is.
I asked this because I don't really know just how large a whale would need to be for such a phenomenon to occur. A museum exhibit about whale falls used a model of a pygmy sperm whale carcass and it made me wonder if they've been documented becoming whale falls. Or if it could just be safely presumed that they do (as broly said, there's no magical force stopping this from happening).
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Derdadort
Junior Member
Excavating rocks and watching birds
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Post by Derdadort on Jul 30, 2016 18:46:13 GMT 5
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Post by Infinity Blade on Jun 19, 2021 16:30:26 GMT 5
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