Episode 7 Field Guide: Walking through Whale Evolution

Whales are spectacularly specialized mammals that seem perfectly adapted to their marine habitat. Plenty of other mammals have gone back to the water, but whales take it to a whole new level. No back legs, weird ear bones, nose on top of the head. What could the land-based ancestor of whales have possibly looked like? Is there a fossil record of walking whales? In this episode we discover whales b …

Filed under: Cenozoic, Cetacea, Eocene, Field Guide, Hippopotamus, Locomotion, Mammals, Systematics, anatomy, evolution, hippo, whale