Land Mammal to Whale transition: fossils

We don't know. Good question. I'm sure, once we have come to understand the genome we'll be able to come up with a minimum number and perhaps a maximum number too. However, I suspect that the answers are going to vary from species to species individual to individual. In short, we don't know. The answer here is simple, either evolutionist's dogma is ill placed or there is no dogma in evolutionists.

Reading the posts here I have learned stuff. Let's see:1. The predictive power of ToE. It was able to predict that certain species existed before any physical evidence of their existence was apparant.2. We don't the exact path that whale evolution took.3. We are currently unable to determine what is the minimum/maximum number of mutations are needed for two creatures to become reproductively incompatible.4. Because of 2 and 3 we can conclude we don't know how representative the fossil record is of the whale's evolutionary path.I think this highlights a) How ToE's predictive power was tested and succeeded; Strengthening the theory and b) there is a lot of unanswered questions with regard quantifications that would be interesting to see done.Thanks to randman and Chiroptera for that.

I have, did you ever hear that the people that formulated stated that it was mutually exclusive to gradualism? It was put forth because the fossil record seemed to indicate that there was long periods of time with very little divergence punctuated with periods of relatively rapid divergence.I'm not sure, which is why I'm asking, but do you associate PE with saltationism?If you don't then I provide this link for the benefits of the other readers, and yourself, if you are interested. Punctuated Equilibrium