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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
Hunting sperm whales required longer whaling voyages, and soon New Bedford and Nantucket whalemen were ranging the globe, cruising "whaling grounds" off of Japan, off the coast of Peru and Ecuador, and along the equatorial regions of the Pacific Ocean. [17] Whale oil was essential for illuminating homes and businesses in the 19th century, and ...
The earliest evidence for life on Earth includes: 3.8 billion-year-old biogenic hematite in a banded iron formation of the Nuvvuagittuq Greenstone Belt in Canada; [30] graphite in 3.7 billion-year-old metasedimentary rocks in western Greenland; [31] and microbial mat fossils in 3.48 billion-year-old sandstone in Western Australia.
Whales are fully aquatic, open-ocean animals: they can feed, mate, give birth, suckle and raise their young at sea. Whales range in size from the 2.6 metres (8.5 ft) and 135 kilograms (298 lb) dwarf sperm whale to the 29.9 metres (98 ft) and 190 tonnes (210 short tons) blue whale, which is the largest known animal that has ever lived.
The family Balaenidae, the right whales, contains two genera and four species. All right whales have no ventral grooves; a distinctive head shape with a strongly arched, narrow rostrum, bowed lower jaw; lower lips that enfold the sides and front of the rostrum; and long, narrow, elastic baleen plates (up to nine times longer than wide) with fine baleen fringes.
It was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site [2] in July 2005 [3] for its hundreds of fossils of some of the earliest forms of whale, the archaeoceti (a now extinct sub-order of whales). The site reveals evidence for the explanation of one of the greatest mysteries of the evolution of whales : the emergence of the whale as an ocean-going ...
When a large marine mammal like a whale dies, its body drifts to the ocean floor in a process known as whale fall. For more than a decade, a succession of sea creatures will live off of the whale ...
Water carried into the mantle eventually returns to the surface in eruptions at mid-ocean ridges and hotspots. [131]: 646 Estimates of the amount of water in the mantle range from 1 ⁄ 4 to 4 times the water in the ocean. [131]: 630–634 The deep carbon cycle is the movement of carbon through the Earth's mantle and core.