Land Mammal to Whale transition: fossils

Hi randman,One problem with your request is that we can not necessarily make a "chain" of fossil animals that lead from one ancient extinct form to the modern day species. For any taxa, the fossil record is not complete; who knows how many generations pass between rare fossilisation events, and who knows whether fossil whale-like forms are a part of the chain, or side branches to it that ended up fizzling out?However, if you are interested in looking at a good quality fossil record of a major evolutionary transition, you have chosen excellent subject matter in the whales. Fortunatley for us, there are a wide variety of apparently intermediate forms between quadrupedal mammals and non-legged modern whales. I can't post details including dated fossil photographs until I get home from the lab, because my whale material is all in my house (and I'm by no means an expert on cetacean evolution, I will need to look it all up in my notes).But the general idea is as follows: There are fossils available that show this entire transition, and they are dated sequentially. I'll post detailed stuff tomorrow.Mickadded in edit: as far as I know, the dental information we can glean from fossils suggests a long period of semi-aquatic life; even the earlist protowhales with four legs appear to have lived in coastal estuaries and been good swimmers. There is a lot of behavioural evidence we can get from the fossil record, and the story is pretty complete. More tomorrow...This message has been edited by mick, 08-03-2005 08:31 PM

Hi coragyps,Part of the fun of this forum for me is that it forces me to look up those dusty old notes that I wouldn't otherwise look at... I will be immersing myself (as the old whales did) tomorrow, and I'll try to make a good coherent case.Mick

Hi,I apologise for not replying to my early post on this thread. I'll try to catch up over the next few days. I had a personal matter that needed my attention.SorryMick