Whales are big. Really big. Enormously big. Tremendously big.

Fin whales can be 140,000 pounds. Bowhead whales tip the scales at 200,000 pounds. And the big mama of them all, the blue whale, can reach a whopping 380,000 pounds — making it the largest animal to have ever lived.

But for as long as whales have awed us with their great size, people have wondered how they became so colossal.

In a study published Tuesday in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, a team of researchers investigated gigantism in baleen whales, the filter-feeding leviathans that include blue whales, bowhead whales and fin whales. The marine mammals became jumbo-size relatively recently, they found, only within the past 4.5 million years. The cause? A climatic change that allowed the behemoths to binge-eat.