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Author Topic:   Evidence for Evolution: Whale evolution
Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 285 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


(1)
Message 3 of 443 (646059)
01-02-2012 4:53 PM
Reply to: Message 1 by dan4reason
01-02-2012 12:36 PM


Whales also have a four-chambered stomach which is a super-stomach meant to grind up grass and leaves that most other animals can't really use. However whales don't eat grass or leaves but they do eat tiny sea creatures called krill, and zooplankton. They also eat tiny single-celled algae, fish, squid, shrimp, marine mammals and birds. Of course different whales have different specialized diets. Whales do not need four-chambered cattle stomachs to eat sea creatures, so a four-chambered stomach is very unnecessary. Having a four-chambered stomach is like cutting paper with a chain saw.
Looking for references for this, I found the statement "baleen whales have four chambered stomach system", in Tamura, T., Konishi, K., Isoda, T., Okamoto, R. and Bando, T. 2009c. Prey consumption and feeding habits of common minke, sei and Bryde’s whales in the western North Pacific. Paper SC/J09/JR16 presented to the JARPN II review meeting, January 2009. Besides cutting up whales themselves, they reference the following two papers:
* Hosokawa, H. and Kamiya, T. 1971. Some observations on the cetacean stomachs, with special considerations on the feeding habits of whales. Rep. Whales Res. Inst, 23: 91-101.
* Olsen, M. A., Nordy, E. S., Blix, A. S. and Mathiesen, S. D. 1994. Functional anatomy of the gastrointestinal system of Northeastern Atlantic minke whales (Balaenoptera acutorostrata). Journal of Zoology, London, 234: 55-74.
Now exceptio probat regulam, and the fact that they specified baleen whales suggests that this is not true of toothed whales.
Another problem is your assumption that the four-stomached whales don't need four stomachs. Why not? You haven't really demonstrated it; perhaps they do. Algae might be as tough to digest as grass and leaves.
You could rescue your argument by showing that toothed whales gain and then lose this arrangement in embryo, but this might not be true --- even if the four-chambered stomach is the ancestral form, the T.o.E. only permits this, it does not necessitate it.
---
You have made no mention of molecular phylogeny and little mention of embryology, both of which are useful lines of evidence. For example, IIRC, baleen whales grow and then lose teeth in embryo.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 1 by dan4reason, posted 01-02-2012 12:36 PM dan4reason has replied

Replies to this message:
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Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 285 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


Message 8 of 443 (646643)
01-05-2012 7:58 PM
Reply to: Message 5 by TheArtist
01-05-2012 6:59 PM


First of all, I do not agree with the evolutionary diagrams depicting the changes happening over several millions of years. The oldest known DNA found according to http://news.nationalgeographic.com/...070705-oldest-dna.html is 400 000 years old. Thus, even getting the ‘youngest’ organism, Odontocetes’s DNA would not be possible. How can a diagram like this be assumed to be true when there are no DNA records that can prove that the transitions are even remotely related?
DNA records are not the only way to detect relatedness, people managed to do that before the invention of DNA sequencing, you know.
For example, even without DNA evidence, wouldn't you conclude that the two animals depicted below were related?
There, how hard was that?
There are so many different species of animals, you could make infinitely many different transitional diagrams to ‘prove’ that one species evolved into another when in fact evolution would totally disagree that the particular animal evolved in such a way. Mesonychids and Pakicetus for example could be two different and unrelated animals, putting them next to each other in such a diagram does not prove that the one evolved into the other. Off coarse I cannot disprove this either, I just believe that it should not be used in ‘proving evolution’ as there is NO evidence! For unproven facts no information is better than fiction.
No-one ever said that drawing the diagram proves the relatedness of the animals.
Rather, it is the evidence of their relatedness that led people to draw the diagram.

This message is a reply to:
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Replies to this message:
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Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 285 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


Message 12 of 443 (646660)
01-05-2012 11:04 PM
Reply to: Message 5 by TheArtist
01-05-2012 6:59 PM


In closing, if whales have these vestigial stomachs why didn’t they just stay on land where they would have gotten the most nutrition from a fully adapted system for eating grass. Where did this need come from? What was so attractive about the sea?
Clearly there is an ecological niche for whales, since there are in fact whales.

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Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 285 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


Message 13 of 443 (646663)
01-05-2012 11:22 PM
Reply to: Message 4 by dan4reason
01-02-2012 8:19 PM


Well, dolphins are toothed whales.
Toothed whales.
and... dolphins have three-chambered stomachs.
Thank you.
I think saying that these stomachs are "unnecessary" is too strong a statement, for one thing it might be read by the incautious as meaning that they're vestigial. They're not, and if you cut three of them out of a whale and then sewed it back up it might well impair its digestion.
If I were to make the point, I'd put it something like this:
There seems to be no functional reason why whales should have multiple stomachs rather than some simpler arangement. The absence of such a reason is evidenced in two ways.
First, the presence of multiple stomachs exists across the whale clade, even though ceteceans don't all have the same diet. It would be a remarkable coincidence if multiple stomachs just happened to suit sperm whales eating giant squid, dolphins eating fish, and blue whales eating krill.
Second, we can see that in other groups of fauna with similar diets multiple stomachs are not present: for example a shark or a tuna with the same diet as a dolphin does not share its digestive arrangements.
However, this anatomical feature can readily be explained as part of the evolutionary heritage of ceteceans ...
... etc etc.
Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

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Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 285 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


(1)
Message 21 of 443 (646997)
01-07-2012 5:20 PM
Reply to: Message 16 by TheArtist
01-07-2012 10:26 AM


Just for interest sake, what other ways are there?
Well, morphology. Hence my picture of the pandas.
I won’t disagree with you there, I will leverage off your comment here to try and make my point a bit more clear. This is something that I’ve been pondering about quite a bit and is quite a lengthy post but it does resolve back into context! Let’s suppose we have a Panda on an evolutionary transition diagram (such as the ones presented in this post) what would you put as the ancestor where it evolved from or the descendant where the evolution is continuing to, looking at modern animals?
I wouldn't put "the descendant where the evolution is continuing to", because that is not the sort of thing we know. For all we know, pandas will go extinct leaving no descendants.
Also people making these diagrams don't usually put "the ancestor where it evolved from" unless they're really really certain. If you look at the whale diagram, it doesn't show one form as being ancestral to another, it shows the order of branching.
Different behaviour, different look etc. Look at the markings, more evil looking face, baldish, flatter snout, different ears, longer beak etc. No flowing intermediate steps alive to show gradual transition from the one species to the other, it is either Panda or Spectacled Bear. Look at it from a slightly different angle, the ease of naming the different transitions (Mesonychids, Pakicetus, Ambulecetus, Dalanistes etc.). If there were any fluent transition between these different versions, it would be difficult to put a name to each of them — if there was a smooth transition between the different species you would have to create bounds to clamp the specie names down.
Well, quite. The only reason we can divide into species is a paucity of fossils, and when we have lots the whole thing becomes rather arbitrary. Where does H. sapiens start, for example? We have to draw a fairly arbitrary line. And yet for practical purposes we have to classify things so that we can look 'em up --- we can't just call them all "life".
If such a diagram (evolution in general) were true then animals on earth would just be a hodgepodge of intermediate steps of evolution ...
Well no, because we don't expect all the intermediate forms to still be alive. If they were, what you're saying would be true, and the concept of species would break down in living species.
There are examples of chain species and ring species, but we can either just shrug and live with them, or we can lump 'em by forcing the relation "species" to be transitive, or we can split 'em by morphology ...
As a concrete example, consider plants in the genus Brassica. B .rapa will breed with B. nigra, B. nigra will breed with B nasus. But B .rapa won't breed with B nasus! Now, how should we arrange them into species? And you can see from their specific name that the solution scientists have come up with is to split them by morphology.
One could argue that these transitional steps were just intermediate species that was later discarded by evolution (natural selection). Why did species evolve into these intermediate steps in the first place? They could not have been half bad as they survived good and well enough to apparently carry our species all the way from the apes to what we are today. Why would they mysteriously be absent from life today?
Well, consider the analogy with technical development. You might as well ask: "If the Atari ST was a bad computer, why did they sell so well? But if it was a good computer, why aren't people still manufacturing them?" Clearly they were good of their time, but were superseded by something better.
If you think about it, the fact that a species is not around today shows that there was some reason that it lost out, and it shows that even if you're a creationist. Finding out what that reason is is sometimes difficult, sometimes easy, depending on the particular case.
And what better laboratory to test these ideas than the here and now?
How do you propose that we do that?
Going back millions of years gets rid of a lot of evidence making these ideas more plausible just because you can always make guess work.
It is true that it is harder to find out what happened millions of years ago than what's happening now. But that's not a reason not to try to do it.
To apply this directly into this discussion’s context the question remains the same. Where is the semi-cow-hippo-whale combo? We are talking about a HUGE transition here all the way from a cow to a whale and there would be ample opportunity for some ‘inbetweeners’. I mean seriously, where are they???
They're in the fossil record.
Again, I would point out --- there must be some reason why the intermediate forms couldn't cut it in competition with the modern forms, because the intermediate forms are dead and the modern forms are alive. I would say that this is because the modern forms are better adapted to the whale niches. A creationist would say --- what? I don't know. That God just made them worse than other whaley things in the first place? But since they're extinct, we know that there is a reason why they're extinct. And this fact would seem to trump any a priori reasoning on your part to try to show that they should still be alive.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 16 by TheArtist, posted 01-07-2012 10:26 AM TheArtist has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 26 by TheArtist, posted 01-09-2012 5:29 AM Dr Adequate has replied
 Message 28 by TheArtist, posted 01-09-2012 6:10 AM Dr Adequate has replied

  
Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 285 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


Message 22 of 443 (647003)
01-07-2012 5:38 PM
Reply to: Message 17 by TheArtist
01-07-2012 10:35 AM


Point taken, however, we are looking at fossils here. A mere outline of these animals. That is a small portion of an animal’s anatomy and these animals can be vastly different otherwise for all we know (organs, skin, hair, eyes etc.).
Well, a couple of whale skeletons.
OK, it's not all the information you could ask for, but if you wanted to decide if they were related, which way would you bet?
No scientist is omniscient, so whenever they say anything they're just saying it based on all the information they have. This is true whether we're talking evolution or Maxwell's equations.
Let me rephrase; it does not mean that if fish or other organisms eat algae and have only one stomach that whales do not need four for whatever reason. I’m not saying that they would need four for digesting algae specifically. I mean that all four could be necessary for their lifestyle and environment i.e. not just there because it used to be part of a cow.
But I've answered that point. The ceteceans have different lifestyles. A dolphin chasing after fish in schools is different from a solitary baleen whale straining out krill, and different again from a sperm whale descending into the abyss to grapple with giant squid. The commonality of their lifestyle is that they swim in the sea, which you could also say of fish.
Now if you're down to saying "maybe there's a good, functional, non-evolutionary reason for this fact ... which I can't think of at the moment", then that's not really much of a critique. A flat-Earther could say that about the evidence for a round Earth ... "maybe there's a good reason why a flat Earth should look round ... which I can't think of off-hand". Well, we can contemplate that possibility, but it's hard to take it seriously.
---
We have to go with the evidence to hand (because we don't have the evidence that isn't) and the ideas we do have (because we don't know what the ideas we haven't had are). And this is not just a fact about evolutionary biology, that's the human condition; we may as well get used to it.

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Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 285 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


(1)
Message 23 of 443 (647005)
01-07-2012 5:47 PM
Reply to: Message 18 by TheArtist
01-07-2012 11:01 AM


Apparently the pelvis is crucial to a whale's reproductive system.
But not to the reproductive system of a shark. If it is, as you say, crucial to the reproductive system, then that still leaves us without a reason (other than its evolutionary history) why the whale has a reproductive system to which the existence of a pelvis is crucial.
A loose analogy ... if I ask why the coal scuttle is there, you can say: "Because it is crucial to the operation of the machine". Yes, but why a coal scuttle? And we would hazard a guess that it's there because it was what the Professor had to hand, rather than that the coal scuttle was originally designed for the role it plays in the Professor's pancake machine.

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Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 285 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


Message 29 of 443 (647301)
01-09-2012 6:12 AM
Reply to: Message 26 by TheArtist
01-09-2012 5:29 AM


"These results reveal a large discordance between morphological and molecular measures of similarity. Rats and mice are classified in the same family, while cows and whales are classified in different orders. Perhaps molecular sequences are not necessarily giving us an accurate picture of ancestry."
"The Marsupial Mitochondrial Genome and the Evolution of Placental Mammals," Genetics, 137:243-256 (1994).
That's a very confused quote, you know.
* No-one claimed that the genetic distances were proportional to the morphological differences, only that both considerations tend to sort animals into clades in pretty much the same way.
* Linnaeus's choice of Linnaean rank has nothing to do with anything.
* Back in the real world, fossil evidence and morphology and molecular phylogeny give us pictures of whale ancestry that agree very closely.
Seems like such a diagram is a pretty doubtful display of ‘evidence’ of the evolutionary process ...
As I told you, the diagram is not evidence at all. It's a summary of the findings. The evidence makes the diagram, the diagram does not constitute evidence.
especially considering that it is only the skeleton and does not include the vast array of other missing features as already mentioned ...
Well, all the evidence we have supports the evolution of whales from land mammals. There is nothing more you can say in favor of anything.
You might as well complain that the theory of gravity is shaky because we can't check that planets have elliptical orbits in the Andromeda galaxy. Except that you don't have a grudge against gravity.
So the only way to prove these or have evidence of these transitions is morphology (DNA is not available) and this is has a large discordance to molecular similarity.
Well, that was confused.
DNA of modern forms is available, and this shows a close concordance with the morphological and fossil evidence.
DNA of extinct forms is not available, so you have no basis on which to say anything about the molecular similarity of these forms.
Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

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Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 285 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


(1)
Message 30 of 443 (647303)
01-09-2012 6:29 AM
Reply to: Message 28 by TheArtist
01-09-2012 6:10 AM


Dr David Berlinski, made an important point in my opinion. He made the now semi famous statement that a cow would have had to undergo over and above 50 000 mutations to reach a whale which sounds very reasonable don’t you think? I would think that it would be way more than that, however let’s say it is only 50 000.
Show your working.
Consider the fact that each of these 50 000 mutations can loosely be considered as new species ...
No. You have ~100 mutations yourself not inherited from your parents, that doesn't make you a new species.
Your assumption is that none of these 50 000 species survived (only the hippo)? For any mutation to live on it would require the animal carrying the mutation to be fit enough to successfully mate with a female. Then the mutation needs to live on a couple of generations to ensure that it does not get lost at some point. I wouldn’t doubt for a second that if a mutation was good enough to enable a male interest in a female or the other way around, that this mutation (or species) would not die out anytime soon.
And the successful mutations are those which are present, accumulated, in modern forms.
Modern whales are alive, ancient whales are dead. This is because of whales not being immortal. What we have are the descendants of the "survivors" --- the survivors survived long enough to mate, not to live until 2012.
But only a hippo stands between a cow and a whale.
No it doesn't. Hippos are not descended from cows. Whales are not descended from hippos. Whales are not descended from cows.
It does not matter how you look at this, 49 920 transition steps being absent today seems a bit suspect.
It's as suspect as my great-grandparents not being alive today, and my great-great grandparents, and my great-great-great-grandparents ... if I really am descended from them, shouldn't some of them still be alive?
However if all of them did die out, I would SERIOUSLY question the existence of hippos and whales ...
Why?
Hippos and whales are alive. The primitive whales in the fossil record are extinct. I don't see why the latter observation should lead anyone to question the former.
Remember that these intermediate steps would have had to be very similar in appearance and function. Only miniscule changes would have happened if it took millions of years. In line with this analogy, you would have thousands of very slightly different versions of the Atari ST. We could say that these different versions came about due to imperfections in the production process. Some might be a very slightly different colour whereas other could have slightly more lead residue on their circuit boards. Then, saying that they were good for their time would include many of the slightly different versions, as the difference between them would be so small it would almost be unnoticeable and for all practical reasons the same thing. Then, when they get discarded due to some new technology, all of the versions will be discarded! You could pick any version and it would still be, very much an Atari ST.
The ‘survival’ of the Atari ST would very strongly guarantee the survival of any of the slightly different version ...
No, because after thousands of generations of STs the ones nearest the basal form would have stopped working.
To take another example from computing, do you know anyone who still uses one of the first IBM PCs?
However, perhaps we are overextending the metaphor. The point I was trying to make is that something can be a good idea in one environment (with one set of competitors) and a bad idea in another environment (with another set of competitors).
Now, we do not expect primitive whales to be able to compete effectively with modern whales, because we expect modern whales to be better adapted to live in the sea.
One would never have to reason that God just made them worse than related species. I can easily say that all creatures were made perfectly in the first place.
You are free to speculate, but whatever the reason, the intermediate forms are dead. Extinct. Not alive any more.
It appears to be your view that if they were magicked into existence by God, it would be perfectly reasonable for them to be dead, but if they were transitional species they'd still be alive.
Why? They're the same animals however they arose. There is some reason why all the whales with hind feet are now dead. Whatever that reason was, it's an equally good explanation if they were transitional.
I bet if you asked the professor what it is for he would passionately ramble on about how important it is to the rest of his machine. I’m just saying that just because you looked at this picture and cannot see an apparent reason for the coal scuttle to assume that it was just what the professor had at hand.
This is an interesting insight into creationist thought processes.
Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.
Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

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Replies to this message:
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Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 285 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


Message 31 of 443 (647304)
01-09-2012 6:32 AM
Reply to: Message 25 by TheArtist
01-09-2012 5:24 AM


There is a book by Dr. Bergman and Howe called Vestigial organs are fully functional ...
And yet the pelves of whales do not have the full function of the pelves of land mammals, since they don't have legs attached to them that the whales walk around on.
"Evolutionists often point to vestigial hind legs near the pelvis. But these are found only in the Right Whale. and upon closer inspection turn out to be strengthening bones to the genital wall."
And yet the legs of a right whale do not have the full function of the legs of land mammals, since they can't walk with them.
This is what makes them vestigial.

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Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 285 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


(1)
Message 32 of 443 (647305)
01-09-2012 6:46 AM


Connoisseurs of creationism will notice that what we have here is the strange intellectual convolution that I think of as the anti-"Why Aren't There Still Monkeys?" When creationists aren't being baffled that humans didn't drive monkeys out of the monkey niche, which we have never attempted to occupy, they're busy being flabbergasted that advanced whales drove primitive whales out of the niche they were both trying to occupy.
At some point they should have a word with themselves and try to straighten this out.

  
Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 285 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


(3)
Message 33 of 443 (647306)
01-09-2012 7:38 AM
Reply to: Message 26 by TheArtist
01-09-2012 5:29 AM


Creationist Scholarship At Its Finest
"These results reveal a large discordance between morphological and molecular measures of similarity. Rats and mice are classified in the same family, while cows and whales are classified in different orders. Perhaps molecular sequences are not necessarily giving us an accurate picture of ancestry."
"The Marsupial Mitochondrial Genome and the Evolution of Placental Mammals," Genetics, 137:243-256 (1994).
I've just been reading through the full text of the paper that you cited, and the "quotation" that you "quote" from it appears nowhere in the text. It does, however, appear on creationist websites. This would go some way to explaining why it's nonsense.

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Replies to this message:
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 Message 69 by TheArtist, posted 01-19-2012 5:22 PM Dr Adequate has replied

  
Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 285 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


Message 38 of 443 (647410)
01-09-2012 4:05 PM
Reply to: Message 36 by TheArtist
01-09-2012 3:44 PM


Re: Creationist Scholarship At Its Finest
I presume you got it from either this ICR page or one of its clones.
I too am not going to speculate on whether the author is a knave or a fool, but he is certainly one or the other. Consider this, from the same article:
None of the suggested whale's terrestrial ancestors (ungulates or carnivores) have a vertical tail movement ...
Did he really claim that carnivores can't move their tails vertically? Has he never seen a cat or a dog with its tail up? Is he blind? Stupid? Mad?
As for this:
Macroevolutionists cannot appeal to natural selection to produce amazing structures like the countercurrent system, although comparative physiologists present countercurrent exchange found in gills and kidneys as structures that repeatedly evolved. Indeed, no known process can turn a four-legged land creature into a blue whale: "Natural selection can act only on those biologic properties that already exist; it cannot create properties in order to meet adaptational needs." Specifically, natural selection cannot produce new structures as is often stated in evolutionary just-so stories; it can only preserve the best-adapted varieties which occur by other means.
Was he asleep in biology class when they explained what the theory of evolution was?
And then ... but I shall save the rest of my derision until you confirm that this text was indeed the source of your misattributed quotation.
Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

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Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 285 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


(1)
Message 41 of 443 (647428)
01-09-2012 4:45 PM
Reply to: Message 37 by TheArtist
01-09-2012 3:51 PM


Re: Creationist Scholarship At Its Finest
I think your comments are uncalled for. You are badmouthing creationists as a whole and this is all you could contribute to the forum so far.
It’s like saying that people are liars. You cannot make such a generalization just because some mishaps do happen. Sure somewhere someone will screw up, and this screw up can be spread quickly if someone forgets to check the validity of the claim as I did. No one is perfect.
But it's not like this is an isolated incident. Saying "no-one's perfect" in this context is like appealing for clemency for a mafia godfather by saying: "My client made a mistake, and he's sorry for it" when the "mistake" lasted thirty years and involved running a vast criminal empire.
This is creationism, and if you'd spent more time checking whether what they say is true and less time just believing it, you'd probably be as disgusted with them as Panda is.

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Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 285 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


Message 47 of 443 (648009)
01-12-2012 3:32 PM
Reply to: Message 45 by TheArtist
01-12-2012 3:13 PM


According to wikipedia "Himalayacetus is an extinct genus of carnivorous aquatic mammal (from the same link you provided).
This aquatic mammal was one of the earliest mammals on your list, alongside Pakicetus and even the Pakicetus seemed to roam dry land.
What is your thoughts around this?
Hold on, weren't you the one saying that loads of intermediate forms should have survived even to the present day?
So if the evidence is consistent with the idea that some of them did survive for a while, is that not what you would expect to see?

This message is a reply to:
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Replies to this message:
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