Blue whales are the biggest animals that have ever existed on Earth but they only recently* got that way.
This is the extraordinary finding from a new study that examined the fossil record of baleens – the group of filter feeders to which the blues belong.
These animals were relatively small for most of their evolutionary existence and only became the behemoths we know today in the past three million years.
That is when the climate likely turned the oceans into a “food heaven”.
Favoured prey – such as krill, small crustaceans – suddenly became super-concentrated in places, allowing the baleens with their specialised feeding mechanism to pig-out and evolve colossal forms.
Read more at BBC.co.uk
