Giant, toothless bony fish dominated the seas for over 100 million years, and like modern baleen whales, these ancient fishes subsisted on plankton, and other tiny creatures, called suspension feeding.

Once thought to have been a short-lived evolutionary failure, new research suggests that these giant suspension-feeding fish existed for a period nearly three times longer than baleen whales. This talk will explore how these giant fishes evolved and lived, and examine why such a successful group eventually went extinct.