Whale skull asymmetry, for hearing, earlier than thought
From “Ancient Whale Skulls and Directional Hearing: A Twisted Tale” (ScienceDaily, Aug. 22, 2011), we learn, re a 37 mya whale: Skewed skulls may have helped early whales discriminate the direction of sounds in water and are not solely, as previously thought, a later adaptation related to echolocation. How one scientist discovered this is quite interesting: “We thought, like everybody else before us, that this might have happened during burial and fossilization,” Fahlke said. “Under pressure from sediments, fossils oftentimes deform.” To correct for the deformation, coauthor Aaron Wood, a former U-M postdoctoral researcher who is now at the University of Florida, straightened out the skull in the digital model. But when Fahlke began working with the “corrected” model, the Read More ›