Natural History Wanderings

The New York Times reports on how is that whales become so big

In a study published Tuesday in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, a team of researchers investigated gigantism in baleen whales, the filter-feeding leviathans that include blue whales, bowhead whales and fin whales. The marine mammals became jumbo-size relatively recently, they found, only within the past 4.5 million years. The cause? A climatic change that allowed the behemoths to binge-eat.

Read full story at  How Whales Became the Biggest Animals on the Planet – The New York Times