Ancestor to Whale now Found in India
Tagged with: discoveries • Science • whales
This is pretty cool and exciting news. Apparently the ancestor to the whale has been discovered.
Whales are known to be descended from land-dwellers but the “missing link” has been a mystery until now. Although Indonyus, as it is known, looks nothing like the whales of today, it shares certain anatomical features.
The structures of its skull and ear are similar to those of early whales, and like other animals that spend a lot of time in water, it had thickened bones that provided ballast to keep its feet anchored in shallow water.
Scientist at one point suspected hippos may be the descendant, but fossil records do not go far enough back to give that conclusion.
DNA studies show that hippos are in fact closely related to modern whales. They do not appear in the fossil record, however, until about 15 million years ago, some 35 million years after the cetaceans originated in south Asia.
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