August 30, 2017
Museums Victoria and Monash University palaeontologists found
ancient baleen whales had sharp predator teeth, debunking the theory that they
were filter feeders like the modern day gentle giants
Ancient whales had extremely sharp predator teeth similar to lions,
Australian scientists said Wednesday in a discovery they believe debunks
theories the mammals used their teeth to filter feed like today's gentle
giants.
There are two major groups of whales—toothed creatures such as
killer whales, and baleen, which filter plankton and small fish from the ocean
for food with special bristle-like structures in their mouths.
Using 3D scanners, Museums Victoria and Monash University
palaeontologists made digital teeth models of fossil baleen whales and today's
mammals from specimen collections around the world.
They found that teeth in ancient baleen whales—the ancestors
of the Southern Right and Blue whale—were different to the present-day and were
instead much sharper.
"These results are the first to show that ancient baleen
whales had extremely sharp teeth with one function—cutting the flesh of their
prey," Museums Victoria's senior curator of vertebrate palaeontology Erich
Fitzgerald said.
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