By
Alex in
Everything Else on Oct 6, 2006 at 5:44 pm
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A teenage surfer in Australia noticed something sticking out of a boulder and discovered the fossil of a new family of whale species:
Fitzgerald found that the fossil had specific features in the facial region and the base of the skull that marked it as a member of the baleen whale group, which today includes the enormous blue whale.
But unlike modern baleen whales, which eat by filtering tiny krill and plankton from water, the fossil whale had teeth. It also had enormous eyes.
"This animal was capturing big, single prey, which is unusual for a baleen whale," Fitzgerald says. "It used the front of its mouth to grip its prey and rip it apart."
Link – via free your imagination, Zaxy’s new blog, dedicated to the discovery of new animal species and fossils
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