Long before whales, pioneering marine reptile was a filter-feeder
The Hindu
Fossils unearthed in China’s Hubei Province indicate that a curious marine reptile called Hupehsuchus nanchangensis that lived 248 million years ago who was a filter feeder
The blue whale and other baleen whales, the gentle giants of the sea, sift huge quantities of tiny prey from ocean water using a filter-feeding system in their mouths. But they were not the first marine creatures to feed like that.
Fossils unearthed in China's Hubei Province indicate that a curious marine reptile called Hupehsuchus nanchangensis that lived 248 million years ago in the Triassic Period employed a similar system during a time of tremendous evolutionary innovation following Earth's worst mass extinction.
Unlike the blue whale, today's largest animal, Hupehsuchus was modest in size, about three feet (one meter) long. It possessed a long and narrow snout, toothless mouth, front and back limbs that could serve as paddles for steering, and a broad tail that it flipped from side to side for forward propulsion.
Long and loose bones made up its snout, with a narrow lower jaw only loosely connected to the rest of the skull to let it open its mouth widely to take in large quantities of water bearing small prey called zooplankton.
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The blue whale and its relatives have baleen plates composed of keratin - the substance that makes up our fingernails - in their mouth to strain out food such as shrimp-like krill from seawater.
Baleen does not lend itself well to fossilization and none was found in the Hupehsuchus fossils. But the researchers identified grooves and notches along the edges of its jaws suggesting the presence of soft tissues that could have served like baleen.