odds ’n’ ends

Scientists think they have answered a whale of a mystery: How the ocean creatures got so huge so quickly.

A few million years ago, the largest whales, averaged maybe 15 feet long. That’s big, but you could still hold a fossil skull in two hands.

Then seemingly overnight, one type of whale — the toothless baleens — became huge. Modern blue whales get as big as 100 feet, the largest creatures ever on Earth. Its skull is now bigger than a minivan and could probably fit more than five people inside, researchers said.

“We really are living in the time of giants,” said study coauthor Nicholas Pyenson of the Smithsonian Natural History Museum. “Why is that?”

And it happened “in the blink of an evolutionary eye,” which makes it harder to figure out what happened, said Graham Slater at the University of Chicago, lead author of the study in Tuesday’s Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Their study has proposed an answer: Ice ages in the last 3 to 5 million years started it, changing the oceans and food supply for whales.

The researchers used fossil records of the smaller whales to create a family tree for baleen whales — which include blue whales, humpbacks and right whales. Using computer simulations and knowledge about how evolution works, they started filling in the gaps between the small whales and the modern super-sized version. They keyed in on a time period when the whales got huge and smaller whale species went extinct, somewhere between a few hundred thousand years ago and 4.5 million years ago.

PEMBROKE PINES, Fla:

WASHINGTON:

An 8-foot (2 meters) python slithered into a Florida garage, startling an unsuspecting homeowner who was taking his dog for a walk.

Joseph Liscinsky tells the Sun Sentinel that he quickly put his 14-pound (6 kilograms) dog back inside his Pembroke Pines house after spotting the snake Friday morning.

Liscinsky says the python bit his fingers as he wrestled with it before wildlife officials arrived.

Pythons are not venomous, but they have a sharp bite. The snakes are an invasive species in Florida, where they are blamed for decimating populations of native mammals.

Liscinsky says he worries pythons could use a nearby canal to travel from the wetlands in the suburbs.

He says wildlife officials planned to euthanize the snake.