ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2017
Low-frequency hearing preceded the evolution of giant body size and filter feeding in baleen whales.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
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13 citing papers in PubMed, 43 citations in OpenAlex.
- Echolocators Are Smaller Than Their Non-Echolocating Relatives: Agility Counts in Dark, Three-Dimensional Habitats.Integrative zoology · 2026Article
- Hearing abilities of a late-surviving archaeocete (Cetacea: Kekenodontidae), and implications for the evolution of sound in Neoceti.Journal of anatomy · 2025Article
- Variation in whale (Cetacea) inner ear anatomy reveals the early evolution of "specialized" high-frequency hearing sensitivity.Journal of anatomy · 2025Article
- Article
- Evolution of orbit size in toothed whales (Artiodactyla: Odontoceti).Journal of anatomy · 2021Article
- What are the limits on whale ear bone size? Non-isometric scaling of the cetacean bulla.PeerJ · 2021Article
- Wonky whales: the evolution of cranial asymmetry in cetaceans.BMC biology · 2020Article
- Article
- Convergent evolution in toothed whale cochleae.BMC evolutionary biology · 2019Article
- Whole Genome Sequencing of Chinese White Dolphin (Marine drugs · 2019Article
- Article
- The bony labyrinth of toothed whales reflects both phylogeny and habitat preferences.Scientific reports · 2018Article
- Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Living baleen whales (mysticetes) produce and hear the lowest-frequency (infrasonic) sounds among mammals. There is currently debate over whether the ancestor of crown cetaceans (Neoceti) was able to detect low frequencies. However, the lack of information on the most archaic fossil mysticetes has prevented us from determining the earliest evolution of their extreme acoustic biology. Here, we report the first anatomical analyses and frequency range estimation of the inner ear in Oligocene (34-23 Ma) fossils of archaic toothed mysticetes from Australia and the USA. The cochlear anatomy of these small fossil mysticetes resembles basilosaurid archaeocetes, but is also similar to that of today's baleen whales, indicating that even the earliest mysticetes detected low-frequency sounds, and lacked ultrasonic hearing and echolocation. This suggests that, in contrast to recent research, the plesiomorphic hearing condition for Neoceti was low frequency, which was retained by toothed mysticetes, and the high-frequency hearing of odontocetes is derived. Therefore, the low-frequency hearing of baleen whales has remained relatively unchanged over the last approximately 34 Myr, being present before the evolution of other signature mysticete traits, including filter feeding, baleen and giant body size.
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