Whale Suckers

There is evidence that an ancestor of the baleen whale family may have been a suction feeder. Bridie Smith of The Age has the story:

The fossilised skull and lower jaw of the whale, found in 1932 by local collectors, is just 45 centimetres long and has unusual features, including a short, blunt snout.

Large holes in the upper and lower jaws indicate the mammal - a close cousin of the 30-metre-long blue whale, the largest animal to inhabit the planet - had huge blood and nerve supply to the lips and facial muscles.

''This is unusual and no other baleen whale has this … and it tells us that the Mammalodon was feeding in a really unusual way. It suggests that it was a bottom-feeding mud-sucker,'' Dr Fitzgerald said. He said the whale probably used its tongue and snout to suck small prey up from sand and mud on the sea floor.

This shows a range of evolution for the early whales, including different feeding mechanisms.

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Just Plain Strange

Wired has a story about evolution gone strange. Titled World’s Freakiest Worm Gets Expanded Family Tree, the story is about a worm that lives on the bottom of the ocean in the bones of dead whales. The author, Brandon Keim, writes:

The worms, found in a gray whale skeleton off the coast of California, prompted scientists to designate them as representatives of an entirely new genus, dubbed Osedax. They belonged to a taxonomic family of marine worms that lack mouths and anuses, and rely entirely on bacteria to absorb and excrete nutrients. But Osedax was unique: Adult males were extremely small, and lived in colonies inside the females. Even more strikingly, they occupied an evolutionary niche comprised entirely of fallen whales.

As Arthur Eddington wrote: "Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine."

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