Pakicetus being presented with webbed feet.

Okay. But Gingerich believes the Pakicetus "hands and feet" were webbed. Can hooves be webbed?--Percy

That's a good question.I wonder if we could actually e-mail them and find out ABE: gingeric@umich.eduThis message has been edited by Yaro, 12-02-2005 10:14 AM

And, just slightly OT, a lot of the distortions in textbooks are the direct result of fundamentalist Christians tampering with the textbook adoption process in places like this grand state I live in. I spent a day at the public hearings on biology texts for our high schools a couple of years back, and it wasn't a real pretty sight.

I'm pretty sure they can, as the hoof is really just sort of a glorified toenail at the end of a digit. The webbing of mammal webfeet is between digits, so the two features don't need to depend on each other. (Though a modern horse, having only one functional digit, would have a tough time deciding where to keep his web.)

Percy, it's the consistent manner in which the data is presented in an overstated fashion. Such and such lived millions of years ago and did this and that. Heck, I remember the tall tale that the precursors to humans lived in forests that turned to Savannahs, and so started standing upright, blah, blah,....The statements and depictions are given as facts when they are nothing more than very highly speculative guesses with very, very little data to support them.It's the opposite of science. It's teaching fantasizing as the scientific method.With only one skull, very little should have been presented on this animal. There was not enough evidence to even venture a good guess as to whether it was aquatic. There's no sense of responsibility within the evo community that I can tell. This kind of thing is not education. It's indoctrination, presenting wild guesses as factual claims.

Can you provide specific instances of webbed hooves?

There is no chance of getting you to accept that there is more than very little data to support the guesses.However, it raises an interesting point. Throughout time-things held to be scientific truths have been overturned by later generations, this has happened so often that anybody with a modicum of education has been exposed to this idea several times over. When something is presented as 'fact' by some people, it should be clear to the student that science is continuously being updated.You are really asking that the tentativity of science be underscored as part of education. I agree. Except of course, the evidence presented in this thread which discusses all the evidence available for making a good guess (eye positions, inferred diet, location of fossils, and its obvious similarity to an approximately contempory creature which was aquatic leads to the idea that this creature was at least semi-aquatic). If you want to, you can address this evidence.

i suspect i know his answer too. something to the effect of: "we don't really know, but we can guess based on {x,y,z}, and anyways it's just a drawing."

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yes. the sitatunga (tragelaphus spekeii), which lives in central african swamps, is an artiodactyl (even-toed hooved ungulate) with webbing between its toes.unfortunately, i can't find you a nice clear picture of its feet, but you'll have to trust all the biologists out in the field.This message has been edited by arachnophilia, 12-02-2005 05:28 PM

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Dromedery Camels have webbed feet as well: BBC - 404: Not Found

An embarasment of riches! Guess we don't commonly think webbed hooves Hippopotamus | African Wildlife Foundation ABE: This message has been edited by Yaro, 12-02-2005 05:04 PM

These examples, at least the 2 with pics, seem a little less webbed than the depiction of Paki though. Thanks nonetheless for providing some data here.

What, everything that has webbed feet has to be webbed to the same degree now? You're pretty hard to please, Randman.

Humans, too, have toe-webs ...

Yes, it has to be relevant to the depictions which are very aquatic in nature without having sufficient evidence to make those claims. Now, we are stuck with absurdities as calling a hooved, land mammal a whale "for effect" as one evo poster here put it.I think doing such things "for effect" is not proper science and indicative of a reasoning process deeply askew in terms of what the goal in science education should be.