By Rafi Letzter, Staff
Writer | May 10, 2018 04:40pm ET
This ancient, gummy whale is
breaking all the rules.
The weird marine beast,
called Llanocetus denticrenatus,
lived about 34 million years ago. It was big. It was an early ancestor of
modern humpbacks and
blue whales. And (this is the maverick, rule-breaking bit for a whale of its
type) it had thick gums studded with teeth.
Today, all the biggest whales are
filter feeders, while only small whales of the odontocetl
group (including belugas, sperm whales, and all dolphins and
porpoises) still chew their food.
Modern large whales instead suck huge
volumes of water through stringy bristles in their mouth called
baleen, separating out tons of tiny organisms, which they digest en masse. This
is such an essential feature of the group of massive whales, or Mysticetes, to
which L. denticrenatus also
belongs, that biologists call whales in this group baleen whales. [Whale
Album: Giants of the Deep]
But L. denticrenatus, according to a
paper published today (May 10) in the journal Current Biology, didn't
have any baleen.
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