Giant Plankton-Eating Fishes Roamed Prehistoric Seas

ScienceDaily (Feb. 28, 2010) — Giant plankton-eating fishes roamed the prehistoric seas for over 100 million years before they were wiped out in the same event that killed off the dinosaurs, new fossil evidence has shown.

An international team describe how new fossils from Asia, Europe and the US reveal a previously unknown dynasty of giant plankton-eating bony fishes that filled the seas of the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, between 66-172 million years ago.

The team report their findings February 19 in Science.

'Today's giant plankton-feeders -- such as baleen whales, basking sharks and manta rays -- include the largest living vertebrate animals, so the fact that creatures of this kind were missing from the fossil record for hundreds of millions of years was always a mystery,' said Dr Matt Friedman of Oxford University's Department of Earth Sciences, an author of the report.

'We used to think that the seas were free of big filter feeders during the age of dinosaurs, but our discoveries reveal that a dynasty of giant fishes filled this ecological role in the ancient oceans for more than 100 million years.'


http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/02/100227171454.htm

Why should the largest animals that ever lived be alive today? Why shouldn't there have been larger plankton-feeders in the past? Pick almost any type of animal, and the largest representative known was prehistoric.

The fish they describe here are only about 30' long, comparable to basking sharks and small whales. Are there other, larger giants out there waiting to be discovered -- or already lying in a museum cabinet somewhere?

I'm expecting some interesting follow-up to this story. :)