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Evolution of Whales

Evolution of Whales

Only 24 years after Charles Darwin rewrote the book of life with his theory of natural selection, a fellow Victorian scientist named William Flower trained this powerful new idea on one of the toughest problems in zoology: the whale. Natural historians had long before recognized that whales are mammals, but that was about as far as they had come in understanding the origins of cetaceans. How evolution had managed to craft such a unique beast presented a mystery as vast as the creature itself.
In 1883, Flower offered an idea that--on the face of it--seemed positively daft. The legless leviathans, he suggested, had evolved from mammals known as ungulates, a group whose best-known characteristic is a set of hoofed feet. In other words, dolphins, porpoises, humpbacks, orcas, and all other whales are close kin of cows, horses, pigs, and related barnyard stock.

The most recent genetic evidence, reported in August, provides the strongest support yet for the hypothesis that whales and hippopotamuses are first cousins. If true, this would slice these marine animals from their long-standing position on the mammal family tree and graft them onto a different branch. It would also suggest that the ancestor of whales and hippos might have

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