Evolution of cetaceans. The cetaceans (whales, dolphins and porpoises) are descendants of land-living mammals, and remnants of their terrestrial origins can be found in the fact that they must ...

Diving into the depths. The first cetaceans lost a lot more than legs when they went back to the water: Entire genes became nonfunctional. In the vast of book of genetic letters that make up a ...

"The evolution of cetaceans is a fantastic story, as these huge and charismatic animals attract the attention of many people," Nery said. "But beyond the curiosity it arouses, these animals can ...

The evolution of modern cetaceans (including whales, dolphins, and porpoises) from terrestrial ancestors required many drastic anatomical, physiological, and behavioral changes. The development of an ...

Pathogen pressure. Early cetaceans faced another challenge when they started swimming: billions of tiny germs. Compared with air, aquatic habitats are a funky stew of viruses, bacteria, and other ...

His research focuses on the origin and evolution of cetaceans (whales and dolphins), major evolutionary transitions in general, functional morphology, use of stratigraphic data in phylogenetic ...

Whales originated from land animals that looked like pigs, but changes in their inner ear helped them evolve into acrobatic swimmers, British scientists reported in the May 9 issue of Nature.

Specifically, the study investigates the evolution of tumor suppressor genes, or TSGs, in the ancestor of cetaceans, as well as in two main lineages: baleen whales (such as bowhead whales), and ...

Early cetaceans evolved from terrestrial quadrupeds to obligate swimmers, a change that is traditionally studied by functional analysis of the postcranial skeleton 1 . Here we assess the evolution ...

These were among the changes that allowed cetaceans to become fully aquatic in as little as eight million years, which is extraordinarily fast in evolutionary terms. Around 38 million years ago, the ...