Tag: whales
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When Whales Could Walk | Full Documentary | NOVA | PBS
PBS Nova has posted the full documentary "When Whales Could Walk" on Youtube. Whales had legs… What?!? In Egypt’s Sahara Desert, massive skeletons with strange skulls and gigantic teeth jut out from the sandy ground. This fossil graveyard, millions of years old, is known as the “Valley of the Whales.” Now, paleontologists have unearthed a…
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Fossil of Tiny, Extinct Whale Discovered in Egypt, Named for King Tut
Smithsonian Magazine has a story about the discovery of a new whale species. The new whale, Tutcetus rayanensis, is named for the Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun. It lived about 41 million years ago. The team of Egyptian research discovered the fossil about 25 miles from the Wadi Al-Hitan World Heritage Site in Egypt, an area rich…
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PBS Eons: How Whale Evolution Kind of Sucked
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one is about the evolution of whales and how and when baleen appeared. Mystacodon is the earliest known mysticete, the group that, today, we call the baleen whales. But if this was a baleen whale, where was its baleen? Where did baleen come from? And how did…
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PBS Eons: How Ancient Whales May Have Changed the Deep Ocean
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one is about how whales changed the ocean. It looks like the evolution of ocean-going whales like Borealodon may have affected communities found in the deep ocean, like the ones found around geothermal vents. And it turns out that when a whale dies, that’s just the beginning…
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Wadi al-Hitan (Valley of the Whales)
Atlas Obscura has a post and podcast about the Valley of the Whales. The Valley of the Whales is a place in Egypt that is just overflowing with whale bones. Its discovery in 1902 provided valuable information about the evolution of the whales. Few sites in the world speak of an evolutionary tale as rich…
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PBS Eons: How the Andes Mountains Might Have Killed a Bunch of Whales
PBS Eons has a new episode and what happened to a bunch of whales. The Andes Mountains might have some explaining to do… At a site known as Cerro Ballena or Whale Hill, there are more than 40 skeletons of marine mammals — a graveyard of ocean life dating back 6.5 million to 9…
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New Eocene-Period Whale Unearthed in Egypt
SciNews has a story about a recently discovered whale from the Eocene of Egypt. Called Aegicetus gehennae, this ancient mammal give important clues in the evolution of whale locomotion. A team of paleontologists, including Professor Philip Gingerich of the University of Michigan, published the details in a recent paper in the journal PLoS ONE. Protocetidae (protocetids)…
