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.
