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Timeline of Whale Evolution - Smithsonian Ocean Portal; Cetacean Paleobiology – University of Bristol; BBC: Whale's evolution; BBC: Whale Evolution – The Fossil Evidence; Hooking Leviathan by Its Past by Stephen Jay Gould; Research on the Origin and Early Evolution of Whales (Cetacea), Gingerich, P.D., University of Michigan
The timeline of the evolutionary history of life represents the current scientific theory outlining the major events during the development of life on planet Earth. Dates in this article are consensus estimates based on scientific evidence , mainly fossils .
1944 — The publication of Tempo and Mode in Evolution by George Gaylord Simpson integrates paleontology into the modern evolutionary synthesis. 1946 — Reginald Sprigg discovers fossils of the Ediacaran biota in Australia. In the 1960s Martin Glaessner would show that they were pre-Cambrian. 1947 — Willard Libby introduces carbon-14 dating.
Whale skulls have small eye orbits, long snouts (with the exception of monodontids and ziphiids) and eyes placed on the sides of its head. Whales range in size from the 2.6-metre (8.5 ft) and 135-kilogram (298 lb) dwarf sperm whale to the 34-metre (112 ft) and 190-metric-ton (210-short-ton) blue whale.
A whale’s body decomposes in three stages—Mobile Scavenger, Enrichment Opportunist, and Sulfophilic—and each stage provides its own benefits to a succession of deep sea creatures.
Mosaic evolution – Evolution of characters at various rates both within and between species; Parallel evolution – Similar evolution in distinct species; Quantum evolution – Evolution where transitional forms are particularly unstable and do not last long; Recurrent evolution – The repeated evolution of a particular character
The whale's scientific name is Eubalaena glacialis, which means "good, or true, whale of the ice". The cladogram is a tool for visualizing and comparing the evolutionary relationships between taxa. The point where a node branches off is analogous to an evolutionary branching – the diagram can be read left-to-right, much like a timeline.
The pygmy right whale shares several characteristics with the right whales, with the exception of having a dorsal fin. Also, pygmy right whales' heads are no more than one quarter the size of their bodies, whereas the right whales' heads are about one-third the size of their bodies. [11] The pygmy right whale is the only extant member of its ...