Imagine looking at a majestic blue whale gliding effortlessly through the ocean, the largest animal on Earth. Now, picture ...

As evolutionary biologist Neil Shubin points out, "In one sense, evolution didn't invent anything new with whales. It was just tinkering with land mammals. It's using the old to make the new." ...

In the process he has shown that whales, once celebrated by creationists as the best evidence against evolution, may be evolution's most elegant proof. "Complete specimens like that Basilosaurus ...

For several years now, Coombs has been studying whale skull peculiarities—such as the structure’s unusual asymmetry in some species—and their implications for cetacean evolution. She first started ...

A mysterious whale that has puzzled scientists for decades may not be an anomaly, but a clue to what climate change is doing beneath the waves.

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 ...

Understanding human evolution through the study of whale evolution Brief definition and history of mammals How did land-based mammals return to the sea? Fossils from "transitional species" trace ...

and its age places it between the emergence of the first whales, which had teeth, and the evolution of the keratin-base sieve that baleen whales use to filter their food. Baleen whales likely arose ...

"When we talk about whale evolution, textbooks tend to focus on the early stages, when whales went from land to sea," said Nicholas Pyenson, the National Museum of Natural History's curator of ...