Giant Plankton-Eating Fishes Roamed Prehistoric Seas, Fossil Evidence Shows
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.
Illustration of Bonnericthys. (Credit: Robert Nicholls.)
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.'
Several of the most important new fossils came from deposits in Kansas in the USA, with other remains from as far afield as Dorset and Kent in the UK, and Japan. Some members of this filter-feeding fish group are estimated to have been up to 9 metres long, a similar size to modern plankton-eating giants such as the basking shark.
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Vol. 327. no. 5968, pp. 990 - 993
DOI: 10.1126/science.1184743
Large-bodied suspension feeders (planktivores), which include the most massive animals to have ever lived, are conspicuously absent from Mesozoic marine environments. The only clear representatives of this trophic guild in the Mesozoic have been an enigmatic and apparently short-lived Jurassic group of extinct pachycormid fishes. Here, we report several new examples of these giant bony fishes from Asia, Europe, and North America. These fossils provide the first detailed anatomical information on this poorly understood clade and extend its range from the lower Middle Jurassic to the end of the Cretaceous, showing that this group persisted for more than 100 million years. Modern large-bodied, planktivorous vertebrates diversified after the extinction of pachycormids at the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary, which is consistent with an opportunistic refilling of vacated ecospace.
1 Department of Earth Sciences, University of Oxford, Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3PR, UK.
2 Environmental Science Program and Department of Biological Sciences, DePaul University, 2325 North Clifton Avenue, Chicago, IL 60614, USA.
3 Sternberg Museum of Natural History, Fort Hays State University, 3000 Sternberg Drive, Hays, KS 67601, USA.
4 Natural History Museum and Biodiversity Research Center, University of Kansas, 1345 Jayhawk Boulevard, Lawrence, KS 66045, USA.
5 Division of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Faculty of Biomedical and Life Sciences, University of Glasgow, University Avenue, Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK.
6 Triebold Paleontology and Rocky Mountain Dinosaur Resource Center, 201 South Fairview Street, Woodland Park, CO 80863, USA.
* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: mattf@earth.ox.ac.uk
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