A Long-Necked Marine Reptile Is the First Known to Filter Feed Like a Whale

The bizarre Mortuneria used sieve-like teeth to strain tasty morsels from the muddy Cretaceous seafloor

by Brian Switek

If you’ve ever flipped through a book of prehistoric creatures or ambled through a major museum’s fossil halls, you’ve probably seen a plesiosaur.

These were the four-flippered marine reptiles that patrolled the seas for almost the entire Mesozoic era, some 250 to 66 million years ago. Some plesiosaurs were big-headed apex predators. Others had ludicrously long necks and snatched up fish and crustaceans with their little jaws.

Now, Marshall University paleontologist F. Robin O’Keefe has discovered that some of them filled their bellies in a way thought to be impossible for the aquatic reptiles: filter feeding.

The findings, presented last month at the annual Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting in Dallas, centered on a plesiosaur that has puzzled paleontologists for over 25 years. Named Mortuneria, this plesiosaur was found in the 66-million-year-old rock of Seymour Island, Antarctica…

(read more: Smithsonian Magazine)

photograph by John Harper/Corbis