Long Before Whales, Pioneering Marine Reptile Was a Filter-Feeder usnews.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from usnews.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Whale like filter-feeding discovered in prehistoric marine reptile phys.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from phys.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
The blue whale and other baleen whales, the gentle giants of the sea, sift huge quantities of tiny prey from ocean water using a filter-feeding system in their mouths. Fossils unearthed in China's Hubei Province indicate that a curious marine reptile called Hupehsuchus nanchangensis that lived 248 million years ago in the Triassic Period employed a similar system during a time of tremendous evolutionary innovation following Earth's worst mass extinction. Unlike the blue whale, today's largest animal, Hupehsuchus was modest in size, about three feet (one meter) long.
Prehistoric Marine Reptile Found to Have Whale-Like Filter Feeding miragenews.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from miragenews.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
A remarkable new fossil from China reveals for the first time that a group of reptiles were already using whale-like filter feeding 250 million years ago.