What was the first fossil record to show the sudden appearance of mammalian artiodactyls?
What is the oldest whale?
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What did Gingerich name the ancestral whale?
Gingerich devoted years of work to trying to locate whale fossils that would show what sort of ankle bones they and their ancestors possessed. In 1991, he found a 40 million-year-old skeleton of a creature called Basilosaurus, an ancient whale that resembled a sea snake.
What did Dr Gingerich ultimately find that helped confirm the phylogeny of ancient whales?
Professor of Geological Sciences In 2000, he found fossils that confirmed the assertion by molecular biologists that whales evolved not from mesonychids, extinct wolf-like animals, but from artiodactyls, the ancestors of hippos and camels.
Where did the oldest whale fossils live?
The oldest fossil whales are about 50 million years old and are believed to have originated in modern-day Pakistan and India.
Are there any whale fossils?
The Smithsonian Institution is home to the largest collection of whale fossils in the world. Examples of nearly every lineage of whale can be found at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) in Washington, DC, or in the museum's storage facility in nearby Maryland.
What evidence did Dr Gingerich find confirming that whales evolved from land mammals?
It was evidence that whales had once been 4 legged animals. What unexpected evidences of whale evolution did Gingerich discover when he found Basilosaurus fossils in the Valley of the Whales? when they swim, they flex their spines up and down similar to running land mammals.
What was unusual about the fossil skull that Gingerich discovered in Pakistan?
Gingerich became intrigued when he found what looked like the fossil skull of an early wolf in Pakistan in 1978. But closer examination of this wolflike skull revealed it contained an ear structure resembling that of modern-day whales!
Where do you find whale fossils?
Egypt's Western Desert region is already known for the so-called Whale Valley, or Wadi al-Hitan, a tourist attraction and the country's only natural World Heritage site that contains fossil remains of another type of prehistoric whales.
What is the oldest whale fossil?
The discovery of a whale fossil dating back to 36.4 million years ago has filled in a gaping hole in the evolution of baleen whales, a group that includes humpbacks (Megaptera novaeangliae) and blue whales (Balaenoptera musculus). The creature, named Mystacodon selenensis, is the oldest baleen-whale relative yet found.
What unusual location holds many whale fossils?
Wadi Al-Hitan, Whale Valley, in the Western Desert of Egypt, contains invaluable fossil remains of the earliest, and now extinct, suborder of whales, Archaeoceti.
Was a whale fossil found in Egypt?
A 43-million-year-old fossil of prehistoric whale with four legs and very sharp teeth has been found in the Egyptian desert.
Did whales use 4 legs to walk?
Although whales are expert swimmers and perfectly adapted to life underwater, these marine mammals once walked on four legs. Their land-dwelling ancestors lived about 50 million years ago.
Why are there whale fossils in the desert?
Some theorists suggest that a mass beaching — in which whales swim onto land and die there — occurred millions of years ago when the desert wasn't as far from the Pacific Ocean as it is today.
What are the evidences used by Gingerich to explain evolution?
Since Gingerich's early discovery in Pakistan, a series of transitional fossils have been found including 55-million-year-old land-dwelling mesonychids, walking whales called Ambulocetus that could also swim, and Rodhocetus, mostly aquatic animals that could probably walk a little on land.
How did wolves whales and the mystery fossil become so different from their common ancestor population?
The differences between whales, wolves, and the Mystery Fossil may have evolved because the ancestors of each evolved in different environments. Populations can become separated into different environments.
What structures would a common ancestor of whales wolves and the mystery fossil share?
Bone structures that are similar between the Mystery Fossil, whale, and wolf include the skull, teeth, neck bones, "one, two, many" front limb structures, rib bones, back bones, tails, and pelvises.
Why did nostrils gradually migrate to the top of the head as whales evolved?
Gradually, their nostrils moved to the top of their heads so that they could breathe easily without the need to tilt their heads while swimming. As some of these creatures began to feed on a different diet, they evolved into baleen filter feeders and lost their teeth.
Who is the scientist who discovered the whale skeleton?
Skullduggery and False Skeletons at Top Museums. Dr. Hans Thewissen, Professor of Anatomy at Northeast Ohio Medical University (NEOMED), is a whale evolution expert. He is famous for discovering the walking whale Ambulocetus and a nearly complete skeleton of the walking whale Pakicetus (shown in the picture above).
What edition of Evolution does Werner write about whales?
There are a host of other problems with walking whales that Dr. Werner documents in the recently released 3rd Edition of EVOLUTION: THE GRAND EXPERIMENT. Read it now!
Why is Pakicetus a walking whale?
In a 2009 PBS documentary, Dr. Gingerich told the audience that Pakicetus was a walking whale because it had a whale sigmoid process.
What is a walking whale?
In 1994, Dr. Gingerich reported finding Rodhocetus, a purported “walking whale.”. It was a four-legged animal with a whale’s tail (called a fluke) and front whale flippers. As recounted by Dr. Werner, “I went to the museum to see the actual fossils and film the interview.
What animal is a missing link?
In the 1980s, Dr. Gingerich found a few scraps of a skull (in charcoal grey below) and imagined that the animal called Pakicetus was a missing link, an animal halfway evolved between land animals and whales.
What part of the whale was replaced by a whale body part?
Whenever a fossil part was missing, they substituted a whale body part (blowholes, fins and flukes) on the skeletal model or skull that they distributed to museums.
Did the whale have a blowhole?
There was no blowhole; there were no flippers (only hooves); and there was no whale’s neck. Even so, the American Museum of Natural History in New York and The Ditsong National Museum of Natural History in Pretoria continued displaying the false “walking whale” skull with a blowhole supplied by Dr. Gingerich.
What was the first fossil record to show the sudden appearance of mammalian artiodactyls?
The Bighorn Basin fossil record was the first to show the sudden appearance of mammalian artiodactyls, perissodactyls, and primates as evolutionary ‘innovants’ and immigrants during a light-carbon isotope excursion marking the beginning of Eocene time.
What is the oldest whale?
The oldest archaic whale known from skeletal remains is Pakicetus from about 48 million years ago, but the best known is Maiacetus from 47 Ma highlighted by a mother whale with a near-term fetus preserved in utero. The mother is clearly female, and the complete skeleton of a male Maiacetus is known as well.