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." ...

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 ...

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 ...

"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 ...