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Ancient Whale Fossils Found In The Desert & Evolution Of Whales. Whale Valley, Wadi El-Hitan Egypt.
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#WadiEl-Hitan #WhaleValley #WhaleEvolution
Did you know whales evolve from a land based animal into an ocean-going mammal?
To look into the evidence we need to look at the desert, which I know sounds a bit strange when talking about Whales.
But did you know that the ocean used to roam across the current location of the Egyptian desert?
Approximately 37 million years ago prehistoric creatures used to swim around in the enormous Tethys Ocean at what is today the dry and windy West-Egyptian desert.
A graveyard of fossilised whalebones demonstrates the evolution of whales.
Wadi Al-Hitan, also known as Whale Valley, located approximately 190 kilometres South-West of Cairo, this is the most important site in the world for the demonstration of Whale evolution.
The common ancestor of Whales and all other land animals was a flatheaded salamander shaped tetrapod that threw itself out of the sea onto muddy banks about 360 million years ago.
Its descendants gradually evolved the function of their lungs, their fins into legs and their jaw joints to hear in the air instead of water.
60 million years ago these evolved mammals turned out to be the most successful of the animal kingdom, but whales were among a tiny handful of mammals that made an evolutionary U-turn, evolving back to eat, move, sense and mate underwater.
Unfortunately there was not much in the fossil record that illustrated this transition, that all changed when University of Michigan’s Palaeontologist Philip Gingerich began excavating Wadi Al-Hitan in the 1980’s.
Here he came across hundreds of whale fossils where he eventually found legs and knees in 1989 when they were excavating a Basilosaurus skeleton.
Curator or fossil marine mammals at the National Museum of Natural History said that; “These skeletons are the Rosetta stone of whale evolution, as this was the first time we could see what the hind limbs of these animals looked like, and they are bizarre”.
There have been older specimen found of footed whales in other locations in the world, but Wadi Al-Hitan’s fossils are unmatched in their numbers and excellent state of preservation.
All whale fossils are from the now extinct suborder of whales called the Archaeoceti and almost all fossils found belong to 2 types; the Basilosaurus was Giant with an eel like body and the Dorudon which looks more like the modern whale, being more heavy and petite.
The main difference between the modern whale and the Dorudon was the teeth, the modern whale has peg like teeth while the Dorudon has serrated daggers.
The current location of Wadi Al-Hitan in prehistoric times was most likely a warm nutrient rich gulf like the modern Baja California where grey whales today give life to their young.
Footage:
Sources:
Giovanni Bianucci & Philip D. Gingerich (2011) Aegyptocetus tarfa, n. gen. et sp. (Mammalia, Cetacea),
from the middle Eocene of Egypt: clinorhynchy, olfaction, and hearing in a protocetid whale, Journal of Vertebrate
Paleontology, 31:6, 1173-1188, DOI: 10.1080/02724634.2011.607985
Please leave a comment, like & subscribe!
Did you know whales evolve from a land based animal into an ocean-going mammal?
To look into the evidence we need to look at the desert, which I know sounds a bit strange when talking about Whales.
But did you know that the ocean used to roam across the current location of the Egyptian desert?
Approximately 37 million years ago prehistoric creatures used to swim around in the enormous Tethys Ocean at what is today the dry and windy West-Egyptian desert.
A graveyard of fossilised whalebones demonstrates the evolution of whales.
Wadi Al-Hitan, also known as Whale Valley, located approximately 190 kilometres South-West of Cairo, this is the most important site in the world for the demonstration of Whale evolution.
The common ancestor of Whales and all other land animals was a flatheaded salamander shaped tetrapod that threw itself out of the sea onto muddy banks about 360 million years ago.
Its descendants gradually evolved the function of their lungs, their fins into legs and their jaw joints to hear in the air instead of water.
60 million years ago these evolved mammals turned out to be the most successful of the animal kingdom, but whales were among a tiny handful of mammals that made an evolutionary U-turn, evolving back to eat, move, sense and mate underwater.
Unfortunately there was not much in the fossil record that illustrated this transition, that all changed when University of Michigan’s Palaeontologist Philip Gingerich began excavating Wadi Al-Hitan in the 1980’s.
Here he came across hundreds of whale fossils where he eventually found legs and knees in 1989 when they were excavating a Basilosaurus skeleton.
Curator or fossil marine mammals at the National Museum of Natural History said that; “These skeletons are the Rosetta stone of whale evolution, as this was the first time we could see what the hind limbs of these animals looked like, and they are bizarre”.
There have been older specimen found of footed whales in other locations in the world, but Wadi Al-Hitan’s fossils are unmatched in their numbers and excellent state of preservation.
All whale fossils are from the now extinct suborder of whales called the Archaeoceti and almost all fossils found belong to 2 types; the Basilosaurus was Giant with an eel like body and the Dorudon which looks more like the modern whale, being more heavy and petite.
The main difference between the modern whale and the Dorudon was the teeth, the modern whale has peg like teeth while the Dorudon has serrated daggers.
The current location of Wadi Al-Hitan in prehistoric times was most likely a warm nutrient rich gulf like the modern Baja California where grey whales today give life to their young.
Footage:
Sources:
Giovanni Bianucci & Philip D. Gingerich (2011) Aegyptocetus tarfa, n. gen. et sp. (Mammalia, Cetacea),
from the middle Eocene of Egypt: clinorhynchy, olfaction, and hearing in a protocetid whale, Journal of Vertebrate
Paleontology, 31:6, 1173-1188, DOI: 10.1080/02724634.2011.607985
Please leave a comment, like & subscribe!
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