ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2017
Independent evolution of baleen whale gigantism linked to Plio-Pleistocene ocean dynamics.
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 63 papers.
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Who cites it
63 citing papers in PubMed, 207 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Life in the slowest lane: Feeding allometry lowers metabolic rate scaling in the largest whales.Science advances · 2025Article
- The diffused evolutionary dynamics of morphological novelty.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Genome-Wide Demographic Analyses of Balaenid Whales Revealed Complex History of Gene Flow Associated with Past Climate Oscillation.Genome biology and evolution · 2025Article
- The complex structure of aquatic food webs emerges from a few assembly rules.Nature ecology & evolution · 2025Article
- Ocean-Wide Conservation Genomics of Blue Whales Suggest New Northern Hemisphere Subspecies.Molecular ecology · 2025Article
- A comparison of genomic diversity and demographic history of the North Atlantic and Southwest Atlantic southern right whales.Molecular ecology · 2024Article
- A High-Quality Blue Whale Genome, Segmental Duplications, and Historical Demography.Molecular biology and evolution · 2024Article
- In search of the origin of crown Mysticeti.Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand · 2024Review
- Giant baleen whales emerged from a cold southern cradle.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Reconciling fossils with phylogenies reveals the origin and macroevolutionary processes explaining the global cycad biodiversity.The New phytologist · 2023Article
- Cetacean tongue mobility and function: A comparative review.Journal of anatomy · 2023Review
- Do beluga whales truly migrate? Testing a key trait of the classical migration syndrome.Movement ecology · 2023Article
- Article
- Sex bias in mortality risk changes over the lifespan of bottlenose dolphins.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Cheap gulp foraging of a giga-predator enables efficient exploitation of sparse prey.Science advances · 2023Article
- Modeling the Evolution of Rates of Continuous Trait Evolution.Systematic biology · 2023Article
3 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Vertebrates have evolved to gigantic sizes repeatedly over the past 250 Myr, reaching their extreme in today's baleen whales (Mysticeti). Hypotheses for the evolution of exceptionally large size in mysticetes range from niche partitioning to predator avoidance, but there has been no quantitative examination of body size evolutionary dynamics in this clade and it remains unclear when, why or how gigantism evolved. By fitting phylogenetic macroevolutionary models to a dataset consisting of living and extinct species, we show that mysticetes underwent a clade-wide shift in their mode of body size evolution during the Plio-Pleistocene. This transition, from Brownian motion-like dynamics to a trended random walk towards larger size, is temporally linked to the onset of seasonally intensified upwelling along coastal ecosystems. High prey densities resulting from wind-driven upwelling, rather than abundant resources alone, are the primary determinant of efficient foraging in extant mysticetes and Late Pliocene changes in ocean dynamics may have provided an ecological pathway to gigantism in multiple independent lineages.
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