A whale of a time at Melbourne Museum… and Bayside too!
In this podcast, Southern FM newsman Colin Tyrus is speaking wth palaeontologist Dr Erich Fitzgerald from Museums Victoria Research Institute about a groundbreaking discovery in partnership with Monash University that has rewritten our understanding of whale evolution. The podcast also covers the Bayside-based project, Raising Leviathan. It’s focused on whale evolution and includes plans to involve the local community of citizen scientists in extracting the largest ever fossil found in Melbourne, an as-yet unidentified species of whale, located in Beaumaris.
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Dr Erich Fitzgerald (R) and Dr James Rule with baleen whale fossil at the Melbourne Museum. Photo by Eugene Hyland. Source: Museums Victoria
Dr Fitzgerald and Dr James Rule (Monash University and Natural History Museum London) have co-authored the open access paper ‘Giant baleen whales emerged from a cold southern cradle’, published in the prestigious journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Baleen whales include the largest animals on the Earth, and how they achieved such gigantic sizes is much debated in the scientific community. Until now, it was believed that the beginning of the Ice Age in the Northern Hemisphere about three million years ago kickstarted the evolution of truly gigantic baleen whales. The new findings reveal that in fact this evolutionary leap in size happened as early as 20 million years ago and at the polar opposite, in the Southern Hemisphere
Photo by Eugene Hyland Source: Museums Victoria