« AIDS: Defeatism or realism? | Main | ABS: Rats can smell your relatives »

Ancient whale 'truly weird'

Blue whale's aged cousin: small, enormous eyes, ate sharks.

A 25-million-year-old whale fossil from southeastern Australia has revealed a bizarre early type of 'baleen' whale. The creature was an ancient cousin of our modern blue whales and humpbacks, but it was hardly a gentle giant of the sea. Instead it was small and predatory, with enormous eyes and teeth.

Read the story here.

Posted by Nicola Jones on August 16, 2006
Categories: | | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

TrackBack

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://blogs.nature.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/1007

Comments

Erich Fitzgerald has also written "A bizarre new toothed mysticete (Cetacea) from Australia and the early evolution of baleen whales" which appears in "Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences".

Abstract:
http://www.journals.royalsoc.ac.uk/link.asp?id=h6h887j21g07641r

Erich Fitrzgerald's homepage:
http://www.geosci.monash.edu.au/postgrad/directory/fitzgerald/index.html

The Sydney Morning Herald's article on this topic, "Discovered: Aussie T-rex of the deep", is at:
http://www.smh.com.au/news/science/discovered-aussie-trex-of-the-deep/2006/08/16/1155407866399.html

and contains a link to a video which is directly accessible here:
http://media.fairfax.com.au/?rid=21161

John Latter / Jorolat
Evolution Research
http://evomech.blogspot.com/

Posted by: John Latter | August 16, 2006 06:56 PM

Post a comment

Comments will be reviewed by staff before being published. You can be as critical or controversial as you like, but please don't get personal or offensive, and do keep it brief. Excessively long entries may be cropped. Remember this is for feedback and discussion - not for publishing papers or press releases.

We strongly encourage you to use your real, full name. Email addresses are required: this is just in case we need to discuss your comment with you privately. They won’t be published.


Please enter the numbers you see below - this helps us to cut down on spam. Note that attempting to post within 30 seconds of hitting ‘preview’ or ‘post’ can cause the system to think you are spamming the site. If you are having trouble with this system, you can instead e-mail a comment to 'inthefield at nature.com'.

Search