Comment on Science Says: Whale of a mystery solved? How they got so big

Science Says: Whale of a mystery solved? How they got so big

[...] it happened "in the blink of an evolutionary eye," which makes it harder to figure out what happened, said Graham Slater at the University of Chicago, lead author of the study in Tuesday's Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The researchers used fossil records of the smaller whales to create a family tree for baleen whales — which include blue whales, humpbacks and right whales. Using computer simulations and knowledge about how evolution works, they started filling in the gaps between the small whales and the modern super-sized version. Slater and Pyenson said cold water went deep and moved closer to the equator and then eventually bubbled back up in patches rich with the small fish and other small critters that whales eat. Baleen whales, which have no teeth, feed by gulping tremendous amount of ocean, filtering out the water and eating the critters they capture. Toothed whales, like sperm whales, hunt individual fish or squid, so the ocean changes that made food less evenly spread out didn't affect them as much.

 

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