Through the 20th Century, sonar -- which uses high-frequency sound waves to detect objects underwater -- was a breakthrough technology that was essential to military strategies.

Scientists at New York Institute of Technology now report they've discovered the oldest example of a whale that used sonar technology, or echolocation, to navigate the seas and hone in on prey.

The research suggests that echolocation evolved in toothed whales, the ancestors of modern-day varieties like killer whales, sperm whales, dolphins and porpoises, sometime between 32 million and 34 million years ago, the research team indicated.

Jonathan Geisler, an anatomy professor at the institute who led the research published in the journal Nature, earlier today unveiled the creature 28-million-year-old creature, Cotylocara macei, which is slightly larger than a bottlenose dolphin.

Geisler told reporters the Cotylocara macei specimen lived about 7 million years after the whale line broke off into two major groups: toothed whales, which were active hunters, and toothless baleen whales, filter feeders that straining food like krill and plankton from the water.

The whale's ability to employ echolocation was "an amazing trait," Geisler said in a story by Reuters. "It's a sonar-like system which allows them basically to navigate and find food, particularly in waters where there's little light, either at great depth or in very turbulent waters with a lot of mud, like estuaries or around marshes."

With its 22-inch skull, neck vertebrae and ribs still intact, the fossilized whale measured at about 10 to 11 feet long and likely swam in a relatively shallow area of the ocean, where it fed on fish and squid, Geisler said. The remains dug up near Summerville, South Carolina, a community north of Charleston

"This is a member of an extinct family that split off very early from other echolocating whales, dolphins and porpoises, Geisler said, so while the Cotylocara perhaps looked like some smaller contemporary toothed whales, it wasn't closely related to them at all.

"They went extinct 25 million or 26 million years ago and they don't have any living relatives," said Geisler.

When whales employ echolocation, they produce very high-frequency vocalizations through a soft-tissue nasal passage located between the blowhole and skull, whereas other mammals, including humans, produce sounds using the voice box, or larynx.

The clicks, squeaks and squeals the whale produces echo off objects in the water and gives the whale a high-resolution audio image of its surroundings.

"They can 'see' the fish and then they know to swim in that direction to catch it," Geisler said.

Bats, which first appeared in the evolutionary timeline more than 50 million years ago, also use echolocation when flying in order to track down insects and other things to eat.