How ancient 'deer' lost their legs and became whales

[Eldorado]

The largest animals that have ever existed on our planet descended from a miniature deer-like creature that walked on four legs in the swamps of ancient India.

Cetaceans include everything from dolphins to whales. They are fairly unique among mammals in that they live permanently in the sea — something they share with only a few other types of live-bearing, warm-blooded species.

But their evolutionary ancestors weren’t always the seafaring types. In fact, just 50 million years ago, ancestors of all cetaceans were small creatures called Indohyus that waded through swamps on four legs.

Full story at Discovery mag: Link

[Harte]

Other descendants include the mouse-deer.
The mouse-deer was part of the scam they ran in the movie "King Rat," where POWs sold rat meat to the Japanese officers saying it was mouse-deer.

Harte.

[Eldorado]

In 1936, naturalist Remington Kellogg said that no fossils of whales had been found in the Indian subcontinent.

He said there was “very strong evidence that they had not yet invaded these regions”. Bapai says that Kellogg’s inference has since been proven wrong by a series of discoveries made in India and Pakistan, first by Vijay Prakash Mishra and Ashok Sahni in the 70s in Kutch, Gujarat.

More recently, in the last 20 years or so, the discovery of the remains of Indohyus by Prof Bajpai and Dutch-American paleontologist Hans Thewissen, have been notable in tracing the ancestry of whales to India.

Prof Bajpai speaks to The Better India regarding his findings over the course of the last 30 years. “Remnants of the earliest whale, which were still learning how to adapt to sea life, were found in a large number in Kutch. We discovered a number of families, which together tell us how these animals moved from land to see,” he says.

Full article at Better India

Edited April 12, 2021 by Eldorado

[Eldorado]

On 3/21/2021 at 7:56 PM, Harte said:

Other descendants include the mouse-deer.
The mouse-deer was part of the scam they ran in the movie "King Rat," where POWs sold rat meat to the Japanese officers saying it was mouse-deer.

Harte.

Mouse-deer munching on mushroom at Thomson Nature Park looks like it's smoking a cigarette.

https://mothership.sg/2021/04/mousedeer-smoke-cigarette/