Ancient Whale Graveyard Preserved in 3D Data Before Becoming a Highway [VIDEO]

In Chile's Atacama Desert, scientists uncovered a pristine record of a series of mass whale strandings over time, the first definitive example of repeated mass strandings of marine mammals in the fossil record, and they were able to preserve the fossils using pioneering 3D scanning techniques before the site was destroyed during a road expansion project.

The fossil site, an ancient graveyard of sorts, was first discovered in 2010, and palaeontologists quickly learned that time was not on their side. The site, known as Cerro Ballena, Spanish for "whale hill," is about three football fields in length, lay adjacent to the Pan-American Highway, which was undergoing an expansion.

Cerro Ballena no longer exists today, but a team of paleontologists and 3D imaging specialists from the Smithsonian Museum, along with their Chilean colleagues, were able to preserve what they could of the site before it was paved over.

They documented the remains of 10 kinds of marine vertebrates that lived 6-9 million years ago. The skeletons of 40 large baleen whales were documented, as were the remains of now-extinct species of sperm whale and and a walrus-like whale.

The most intriguing part about the fossil site, the researchers said, was how the whales were arranged. The skeletons were preserved in four tiers, which the researchers said is indicative that the whales died from a similar and repeated cause.

The suspected cause of death: toxic algae. In the 1980s a group of 12 whales washed ashore dead near Cape Cod, Mass. with no apparent signs of trauma. Marine biologists studying the case learned that the whales had become poisoned by eating fish that were loaded with poisons linked to toxic algal blooms.

"Harmful algal blooms in the modern world can strike a variety of marine mammals and large predatory fish. The key for us was its repetitive nature at Cerro Ballena: no other plausible explanation in the modern world would be recurring, except for toxic algae, which can recur if the conditions are right," said Nicholas Pyenson, a paleontologist at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History and lead author of the research, which is published in the Proceedings of The Royal Society B.

"All the creatures we found - whether whales, seals or billfishes - fed high up in marine food webs and that would have made them very susceptible to harmful algal blooms," Pyenson told the BBC.

To coincide with the publication of the research, the Smithsonian Museum has made the much of its digital data of Cerro Bellena available at cerroballena.si.edu.