Uphill Battle said:
Anyone care to explain the evolution of the whale? Just out of curiosity, I want to know what the theory of how a mammal became a waterbound creature.
Uphill Battle said:
Did a land creature decide to return to the sea?
Or did a fish creature evolve into a mammal?
what theories are there for this?
The cladogram depicting whale evolution is from the book
Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea by Carl Zimmer. The artwork is a slight modification of the illustration by Carl Buell in
At the Water's Edge by Zimmer. The book is a companion to the PBS series of the Evolution Project, a coproduction of the WGNH/NOVA Science Unit and Clear Blue Sky Productions.
It was not until 1979 that paleontologists had their first indisputable evidence about whale transition.
Pakicetus was discovered by Philip Gingerich in Pakistan. Later, in 1995, Hans Thewissen found
Ambulocetus. Whales with legs are now known from Pakistan, India, Egypt and the U.S.A.
It took less than 15 million years for the whale lineage to move from land, through shallow bays and coastal waters, to deep marine environments. By 40 million years ago whales had become essentially the animals we know today.
The evolution of whales involved much more than legs becoming flippers or vestigial organs. The fossil series demonstrates how their breathing apparatus changed, their ears changed and other body parts changed. If you are interested in detailed taxonomic descriptions, click on an animal illustrated at right to be taken to another website with that information.
Whales did not turn into fish. Inside every flipper is found the bones of the mammalian hand. They swim like otters by undulating the mammalian spine. The tail fluke is not a fish fin. Evolution works by modifying existing body plans to fit new conditions of life, and is often constrained by developmental pathways. No longer limited by gravity and strength of bones, whales could become giants of the sea.
Stephen Gould said:
If you had given me a blank piece of paper and a blank check, I could not have drawn you a theoretical intermediate any better or more convincing than Ambulocetus. Those dogmatists who by verbal trickery can make white black, and black white, will never be convinced of anything, but Ambulocetus is the very animal that they proclaimed impossible in theory.
Cetaceans have unique semicircular canals that allow them to be highly acrobatic swimmers without becoming dizzy. By investigating this organ in ancient fossils, the researchers found that early whales acquired this special trait quickly and early on in their evolution. This was a defining event that likely resulted in their total independence of life on land.
Side view of the inner ears of, left to right, a land mammal (bushbaby), a land-living early whale from Pakistan (50-million-year-old Ichthyolestes), a marine early whale from India (45-million-year-old Indocetus), and a modern dolphin. The latter two aquatic species have much smaller semicircular canals than the former two. Image reconstructed from computed tomography scans, adjusting for body size differences between the animals. Each inner ear would easily fit on a penny. [Image by F. Spoor using Voxel-man]
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/11/2/e_s_3.html (This video for high-school students describes two lines of evidence, fossil and molecular, which contribute to our picture of evolution. It focuses on whales, which provide an excellent opportunity to examine the transition between species because so many intermediate fossils have been found.)
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2001/09/0919_walkingwhale.html (
Ancient Walking Whales Shed Light on Ancestry of Ocean Giants)
SOURCE: http://www.origins.tv/darwin/landtosea.htm