Now researchers have confirmed that an historical dolphin that lived throughout the Oligocene Epoch — 33.9 million to 23 million many years in the past — was the to start with cetacean (a kind of mammal) making use of echolocation to navigate underwater and fill the position of apex predator, a great deal like the […]
Paleontologen hebben een nieuwe walvissensoort beschreven, die zo’n 3 miljoen jaar geleden in de Noordzee rondzwom. Antwerpibalaena liberatlas is een uitgestorven neefje van de huidige noordkapers. Het goedbewaarde fossiele skelet werd in 2013 gevonden bij de aanleg van de Kieldrechtsluis in de Antwerpse haven. >> lees verder …
A wondrous lineage of crocodile relatives that developed into fast-swimming seagoing predators at a time when dinosaurs dominated the land adapted to life in the open ocean with a pivotal evolutionary modification also present in whales. But the crocs did it more than 100 million years earlier. >> Read more …
Animals that resemble each other may not be closely related. Sometimes the setting shapes their bodies more than their ancestry. Manatees may look like whales or walruses, but that is only because they adapted to the marine environment in a similar way. Martha Foley and Curt stager talk about convergent evolution. >> listen …
The adaptation 50 million years ago of a lineage of terrestrial mammals to aquatic environments is one of the most well understood events in mammalian evolutionary history. It’s also one of the most dramatic. >> read more …
The ancestors of modern cetaceans (whales, dolphins, and porpoises) transitioned from a terrestrial to a fully aquatic lifestyle during the Eocene about 50 million years ago. This process constitutes one of the most marked macroevolutionary transitions in mammalian history and was accompanied by profound anatomical, physiological, and behavioral transformations that allowed cetaceans to adapt and […]
Some early whales may have swum using their arms as well as their legs, a bit like a dog paddling in water. Despite this primitive swimming style, they seem to have managed to spread long distances across the ocean, from India to the western tip of Africa at a minimum. – photo credits: Momotarou2012 [CC […]
In het Natuurhistorisch Museum Maastricht loopt een tentoonstelling over de evolutie van de walvisachtigen. Die oceaangiganten van vandaag stammen af van… een klein hertje. Bovendien heeft een Belgische wetenschapper recent een missing link beschreven. >> lees verder …
Answers to evolutionary and ecological mysteries about marine mammal species may be closer at hand, thanks to advances in genetic sequencing techniques for so-called nonmodel organisms. Kristina Cammen, a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow in biology and soon-to-be assistant professor of marine mammal science at the University of Maine (starting May 2017), led the research […]
Though mammals adapted on land, a new study by Maria Chikina and Nathan Clark has shown that during three major independent evolutionary events, a number of mammals harkened back to the sea. >> Continue …
Wetenschappers uit Nieuw-Zeeland hebben een nieuwe prehistorische soort walvis geïdentificeerd die de ontbrekende schakel blijkt te zijn tussen de moderne baleinwalvis en hun uitgestorven voorouders die nog over een mond vol tanden beschikten. >> Lees artikel … >> Nl-vertaling …
Ansan (Korea), 24 november 2013 – Wetenschappers van The Korea Institute of Ocean Science and Technology zijn erachter gekomen hoe walvissen zich evolutionair aangepast hebben aan leven in water. Zij hebben daartoe genetisch materiaal van walvissen uitvoerig geanalyseerd. >> Lees verder … >> Oorspronkelijk artikel in Nature Genetics …