The Atacama Desert, in Chile, is a mass graveyard for nine million year-old whales. What gives?

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRLZ29mLdSQ&w=600&h=315]

Here's a new paper, summarized in layman's terms here, that explains the "whale graveyard" paleontologists had found in Chile. Turns out, the whales were toppled by nothing more than simple algae. At the time of first discovery of all this, in 2010, it was confusing scientists because there…