34 million-year-old ancient whale would have ripped you to shreds
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, foxnews.com reported.
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.
But L. denticrenatus, according to a paper published in the journal Current Biology, didn’t have any baleen.
After the flesh of ancient creatures has long rotted away, it can be tricky to determine what these animals looked like when they were alive. But researchers studied a remarkably complete L. denticrenatus skull found in Antarctica and were able to make some judgments about the flesh it likely supported, based on its ridges, grooves, and holes for blood vessels and nerves.
L. denticrenatus, they found, did have large gums, which included some signs of features that may have preceded baleen. But those gums were studded with teeth — the sort of teeth creatures use to take bites out of one another.
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