Scientists find hundreds of whale bones deep in Indian Ocean

Scientists from China have found the bones of many whales at the bottom of the Indian Ocean. Some of the bones are more than five million years old. The team wrote about the discovery in Nature, a science magazine, on June 10, 2026.

The team was led by Xiaotong Peng of the Institute of Deep-sea Science and Engineering. The institute is part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and is in Sanya, a city in China.

In February and March 2023, the team went down to the sea floor in a submersible^*1 called Fendouzhe. They made 32 dives in the Diamantina Fracture Zone, a long crack in the sea floor in the southeast part of the Indian Ocean. The water there is between 4,616 and 7,001 meters deep.

The team looked at an area of about 0.64 square kilometers^*2 along a line about 1,200 kilometers long. They found 485 places with whale bones. Some of the bones were fossils^*3. At other places, sea animals were living on the bones. The deepest find was three backbone bones at 6,788.7 meters.

Tests on the bones showed that the oldest ones are at least about 5.3 million years old. The team found 35 species^*4 of large animals living on the sea floor. They also identified six species of whales. Two of these are extinct^*5. One is a new species. The team gave it the name Pterocetus diamantinae.

1. *1 submersible: a small boat that can go deep under the water with people inside
2. *2 square kilometers: a way to measure how big an area is; one square kilometer is a square with sides of one kilometer
3. *3 fossils: bones or other parts of animals or plants that turned to stone over a very long time
4. *4 species: one kind of animal or plant
5. *5 extinct: no longer living anywhere in the world