An early initial assumption, Peredo said, was that ocean-dwelling mammals must have needed teeth or baleen to eat—but several living whales contradict that idea. Sperm whales have teeth in their ...

Before baleen whales developed their iconic bristled filter-feeding structures, they relied on their pointy teeth and a suctioning method to nab and gulp down prey, a new study finds .

Many whales feed by filling their mouths with water, then straining organisms out of that water as they expel it, using fibrous plates in their mouth called baleen. Now, scientists claim to have ...

About 25 million years ago, a marine mammal possessed both teethand baleen, the filter-feeding structure found in blue whales andrelatives. Then that creature lost its teeth and began developingint… ...

Today's baleen whales ... Ancient skull shows early 'baleen whale' had teeth. ScienceDaily. Retrieved June 2, 2025 from www.sciencedaily.com / releases / 2018 / 05 / 180510150220.htm.

Baleen whales lost their teeth gradually, replacing them fully with baleen about 20 million years ago. We know a lot about baleen whales, which include blue whales, humpbacks, ...

"Toothed whales don't sing like baleen whales," Madsen said. "It is believed that baleen whales use their vocal folds in the larynx like other mammals, but we still don't know how baleen whales ...

A restoration of Mammalodon by Brian Choo (published in Fitzgerald, 2009). In the introduction to his 1883 lecture on whales, the English anatomist William Henry Flower said; Few natural groups ...

WHALE IN TRANSITION The skull of Mystacodon, a 36-million-year-old whale found in Peru, is an early relative of today’s baleen whales. Its skull (shown here) has a flattened snout and a mouth ...

As a result, it has not been clear whether, as they evolved, early baleen whales retained the teeth of their ancestors until a filter-feeding system had been established.

Today's baleen whales ... "Until recently, it was thought that filter feeding first emerged when whales still had teeth," adds R. Ewan Fordyce at the University of Otago in New Zealand.