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Today's baleen whales (Mysticetes) support their massive bodies by filtering huge volumes of small prey from seawater using comb-like baleen in their mouths much like a sieve. But new evidence reported in the journal Current Biology on May 10 based on careful analysis of a 34-million-year-old whale skull from Antarctica -- the second-oldest "baleen" whale ever found -- suggests that early whales actually didn't have baleen at all. Their mouths were equipped instead with well-developed gums and teeth, which they apparently used to bite large prey.
"Llanocetus denticrenatus is an ancient relative of our modern gentle giants, like humpback and blue whales," says Felix Marx of the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences. "Unlike them, however, it had teeth, and probably was a formidable predator."
"Until recently, it was thought that filter feeding first emerged when whales still had teeth," adds R. Ewan Fordyce at the University of Otago in New Zealand. "Llanocetus shows that this was not the case."
Like modern whales, Llanocetus had distinctive grooves on the roof of its mouth, the researchers explain, which usually contain blood vessels that supply the baleen. In Llanocetus, however, those grooves cluster around tooth sockets, where baleen would have been useless and at risk of being crushed.
"Instead of a filter, it seems that Llanocetus simply had large gums and, judging from the way its teeth are worn, mainly fed by biting large prey," Marx says. "Even so, it was huge: at a total body length of around 8 meters, it rivals some living whales in size."
Materials provided by Cell Press.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Sunday May 13 2018, @03:25PM (3 children)
"Llanocetus" is not a huge family of animals, nor a huge body of evidence, in this context. It's a single skull. It does not show that anything was or was not the case. Rather, it shows a single case in which something was or was not. I know "more study is needed" is so common as to be almost a joke, but it's definitely the case here.
"Dude, there was this one skull, that had, like, huge teeth, so that totally disproves the whole idea of filter feeding developing in any whale anywhere while any other whale also had teeth." <-- Not scientific nor logical
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 13 2018, @07:11PM
This is standard, it usually uses a bit of math and is called nhst but same thing. "Reject hypothesis A then conclude whatever you want" is allowed to pass as science now. As long as some data is collected, some hypothesis is tested, and a paper that looks academic is produced it is ok.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday May 14 2018, @07:06AM (1 child)
If you can offer an explanation for your position of "Here's the skull of an mature whale with teeth. Since we could find one and one only, we must assume that this was an accident, very likely a single individual in no way representative for any species in existence at the time", I'd be tempted to agree with you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Monday May 14 2018, @04:29PM
Yes, of course it represents a species, that of its previous owner. It doesn't represent all contemporaneous species, nor those before and after it in time, which it would need to do in order to "[show] that this was not the case...that filter feeding first emerged when whales still had teeth".
A single skull can tell us about things that have happened, but it can't tell us the entire evolution of a species.
If the whale's baleen evolved when whales still had teeth, then this whale skull supports that theory, in that it's a whale with teeth. Similar modern whales have baleen. Some evolution within the species (or at least genus) happened in between, and did so while there were extant similar whales with teeth (in the person of our friend here).
It's certainly suggestive, and certainly raises questions, but suggestive question-raising really isn't enough to conclude "Boy, were we wrong."