As evolutionary biologist Neil Shubin points out, "In one sense, evolution didn't invent anything new with whales. It was just tinkering with land mammals. It's using the old to make the new." ...

Imagine standing on a muddy riverbank 50 million years ago and seeing a strange creature lumbering by—part crocodile, part ...

The evolution of modern cetaceans (including whales, dolphins, and porpoises) from terrestrial ancestors required many drastic anatomical, physiological, and behavioral changes. The development of an ...

For several years now, Coombs has been studying whale skull peculiarities—such as the structure’s unusual asymmetry in some species—and their implications for cetacean evolution. She first started ...

In the process he has shown that whales, once celebrated by creationists as the best evidence against evolution, may be evolution's most elegant proof. "Complete specimens like that Basilosaurus ...

"When we talk about whale evolution, textbooks tend to focus on the early stages, when whales went from land to sea," said Nicholas Pyenson, the National Museum of Natural History's curator of ...

Understanding human evolution through the study of whale evolution Brief definition and history of mammals How did land-based mammals return to the sea? Fossils from "transitional species" trace ...

And although the geologists didn’t realize it at the time, the prehistoric specimens in the sand would offer clues to one of evolution’s most nagging questions: how whales became whales in the ...