Ancient monster whale more fearsome than Moby Dick

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Bicho Voador & Bicho Sugador
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Ancient monster whale more fearsome than Moby Dick

The fossilised skull of a colossal whale with a killer bite has been uncovered by a team who reckon the monster shared the Miocene oceans with a giant shark.
The bones, dated to 12 to 13 million years ago, were spotted by Klaas Post of the Natuurhistorisch Museum Rotterdam, the Netherlands, in Peru's Ica desert. In homage to Herman Melville's Moby Dick, the beast has been named Leviathan melvillei.
The skull is a huge 3 metres long, says team member Olivier Lambert at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences. The team estimates the whale would have been between 13 and 18 metres long, like a modern sperm whale.
What really surprised the researchers was the size of the whale's teeth. "Some of the biggest ones are 36 centimetres long and 12 centimetres wide, and are probably the biggest predatory teeth ever discovered," Lambert says.
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Great artist impression in link says it all.
 
No they eat live fish etc
There's a feeding section about half way down on wikipedia sperm whale page (sorry can't post links).
 
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Of course they are predators. I'm trying to coax Enmos into qualifying his statement.
 
They probably ate plants. With teeth like that. Yes, they were definitely into veggie burgers.

Okay, this thing vs. giant squid. Which is the victor?
 
Haha, no, no. You are correct in your first post in this thread, when it comes to terrestrial organisms. Very large terrestrial carnivores tend to be scavengers (at least by popular reasoning last I checked). Last I read, Tyrannosaurs were thought to be scavengers, at least in part.

But current day sperm whales, which the article states are the same size as the pre-historic whale, are carnivores that do not scavenge. So the same argument of large size equalling scavenger behaviour does not appear to be true for aquatic carnivores.
 
The best clue to what an animal feeds on, from fossil remains, is the teeth. I tried to work this out from the picture in the OP's reference, but it is not real easy. The researchers, apparently, suggested it fed on small baleen whales, and that sounds pretty reasonable to me. Today, we have the example of the Mincke Whale, which grows to 6 metres long, and is the most abundant of all baleen whales. Pretty good food supply for an over sized predator.
 
Lions are quite often "scavengers." They ruitenely chase off hyena's from their prey and claim it as their own.
 
That's what the huge weapons are for (the teeth) to slay anything, including other predators in it's path. Apex Predator. Scavenger in my mind ( so I'm probably wrong) means they come along after the big guys have eaten their full or are busy killing more stuff. This guy is fulling willing to eat anything, including other predators...then eat their supper too.
 
Idle Mind said:
Are current day sperm whales scavengers?
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The cetaceans fall into two suborders: Odontoceti, the toothed whales, and Mysticeti, the baleen whales.

Even though the cetaceans evolved from artiodactyls (even-toed hoofed animals including cattle, sheep, pigs, giraffes, camels, deer, etc.)--specifically from primitive hippopotamuses who swam all the way to the mouth of the river and kept going--all cetaceans are carnivores.

Baleen whales effectively "graze" on krill (tiny shrimp) by taking in huge mouthfuls of water and filtering it back out through the baleen plates that their teeth evolved into. The toothed whales are all predators. They customarily feed on fish but they'll eat anything they can catch and the larger ones such as the orca will happily eat seals and penguins, or even gang up, drown and eat a baby grey whale.

The two groups of cetaceans are easy to tell apart since the toothed whales are the dolphins (including porpoises and orcas) whereas the baleen whales are the larger whales of legend.

With one exception: the sperm whale is a toothed whale, distantly related to the dolphins. Sperm whales are predators, although unlike the dolphins they don't hunt in packs.

And no, there are no verifiable accounts of an orca or a sperm whale attacking a human.
 
nietzschefan said:
That's what the huge weapons are for (the teeth) to slay anything, including other predators in it's path.
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Probably not. Outsize weaponry and jaw structure is a handicap in predation - catching prey is harder than killing it.

Somewhere, maybe on line, is a graph showing how jaw size correlates with scavenging as a nutritional source - the biggest jaws and teeth tend to belong to scavengers, for the same reason the biggest wings and beaks tend to belong to scavengers: they are far more important for both defending and dismantling a bonanza of food, such as a large carcass, than for catching and killing live prey.

They are also handy for poaching - it's the wolves that kill elk, in Yellowstone, while the grizzlies with their weaponry poach and scavenge their kills.

In North America there is good data correlating the emergence of powerful jaws and big teeth with climate - as the continent became by turns drier, the ability to crush bones for their marrow and defend a rich find became relatively more important than the ability to run down and capture fleet prey.

Whether similar pressures influence pelagic adaptation I don't know, but a huge clumsy head does not strike me as all that useful for predation in such an open environment - modern killer whales, say, are fast and sleek and not that big.
 
Fraggle: I understand that. My response was to get Enmos to expand on his statement. My apologies for being unclear.

Thank you for the information, however, as many readers will find it interesting.

iceaura: What you say about jaw structure is definitely true for terrestrial creatures, but I can't see it being the norm in aquatic ecosystems (especially given how difficult scavenging is in a place such as the ocean).

We are left with a lot of assumptions to make though.
 
idle mind said:
(especially given how difficult scavenging is in a place such as the ocean).
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That's a question, not a given.

Dead whales were at one time common enough, in certain areas of ocean, that an entire little traveling ecosystem has apparently developed based on colonizing their bodies, much as one has developed for large dead animals on the continents (specialized insects, animals, bacteria, annelids, birds, etc).

The large animals of the ocean are concentrated in certain regions, mostly fairly shallow and bounded ones - not evenly distributed over the unsoundable depths. The era of this whale saw even more such environment, large and thickly inhabited areas of shallow seas.
 
Sharks, even if they are apex predators, don't pass on the opportunity to scavenge.
http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/vertebrates/Doug/shark.html said:
White sharks are predatory animals that begin life by feeding on fish, rays, and other sharks, and as they grow, switch to feeding on marine mammals and scavenging on large animal carcasses.
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In fact, I think a good many predators will scavenge if given the opportunity.
These whales are so large that I can't see them actively hunting smaller prey.
 
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