The weird case of a whale necropolis, sat at the bottom of an ocean trench for 5 million years

The deep sea environment holds many mysteries but yields hardly any fossils. A new mindblowing finding at the bottom of the Indian ocean challenges the way we think about life in the deep and the nature of palaeontology. In 2023, a Chinese submersible exploring a 6km deep trench found 476 fossil cetaceans. These extinct whale fossils were covered with life forms previously unknown to science, and what's more, the fossils ranged in age from recent to 5 million years old. How did they get there? Why so many? Can fossils really accumulate in the same place for 5 million years, and just…. sit there? 

This week's paper is "A 5.3-million-year-old deep-sea whale necropolis in the Diamantina Zone" by Xiaotong Peng and colleagues, published in Nature in June 2026 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10546-z

Wide screen includes picture from Global Trend.