Posted on 08/31/2006 4:57:28 AM PDT by Alex1977
Paleontologists have uncovered a 25-million-year-old whale fossil with a monstrous set of teeth and enormous eyes on the coast of Australia.
The discovery has researchers rethinking whales’ evolutionary history.
Scientists were surprised to find that the vicious-looking specimen is an ancestor of modern baleen whales, gentle giants of today’s seas. The fossil suggests a creature that grew to a little more than 11 feet with teeth about an inch-and-a-half long.
Baleen whales, which include the blue and humpback, feed by filtering plankton and small fish from seawater through hair-like fibers in their jaws. Their ferocious forebears, on the other hand, appear to have used their teeth to rip and chew meat, said lead researcher Erich Fitzgerald, a palaeobiologist at the Museum Victoria in Melbourne, Australia.
The details of the finding are published online in the Aug. 16 Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B.
Strange mix
Today there are two groups of whales: Mysticetes, or baleen whales, and odontocetes, or toothed whales such as orcas and dolphins. Some modern baleens do have teeth, but they use them for filtering rather than biting. Scientists believe the two groups diverged about 35 million years ago.
The fossil’s skull shape tells scientists this is undoubtedly a baleen whale, Fitzgerald said.
In many ways it is markedly different from its modern counterparts though. The fossil whale has a more varied set of teeth and extremely long incisors, as you might expect to see on a cat or other terrestrial carnivorous animal, said Alton C. Dooley, Jr., Assistant Curator of Paleontology at the Virginia Museum of Natural History.
(...)
Rethinking evolution
It now appears whale evolution was more complex than a simple split 35 million years ago.
(Excerpt) Read more at livescience.com ...
whale ping!
PING!
Indeed. And it's not "just another fossil." Maybe I should crank up the ping machine. Lemme see if there's any other news out there.
[singing] "Whale meat again, don't know how, don't know when..."
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Note: this topic is from 08/31/2006. Thanks again to Alex1977. |
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