whales
laelaps | January 26, 2009
A porpoise, or "sea-hog", from Appletons' Annual Cycloaedia.
I do not have much time to write today, so rather than type something from scratch I have decided to share an excerpt from my book (still in-progress).
In my recent post "Ancient Armored Whales" I briefly drew attention to a quote from Richard Lydekker deriding William Flower's hypothesis that whales may have evolved from ungulates. Presented below in the passage on this subject as it presently appears in the chapter "As Monstrous as a Whale";
A lack of other transitional forms had stirred debate about the place of Basilosaurus…
laelaps | January 23, 2009
The skull of Basilosaurus, from the 1907 Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution.
In 1900 the famous bone sharp Barnum Brown discovered the skeleton of a huge carnivorous dinosaur in Wyoming, and near its bones were a few fossilized bony plates. When H.F. Osborn described this creature as Dynamosaurus imperiosus he used this association to hypothesize that this predator was covered in armor, but as it turned out "Dynamosaurus" was really a representative of another new dinosaur Osborn named Tyrannosaurus rex. Osborn's famous tyrant showed no sign of being covered with armor, and the…
laelaps | January 22, 2009
A restoration of the Warren mastodon entombed in sediment, from Popular Science.
In 1841 S.B. Buckley was the first to mount a skeletal restoration of Basilosaurus, but his efforts to do so have generally been forgotten. The skeleton changed hands several times during the 1840's and Buckley's more accurate restoration was overshadowed by Albert Koch's monstrous "Hydrarchos", a fantastical creature made from Basilosaurus bones.*
*[I have to admit that that I have not seen any illustrations of Buckley's restoration. My statement regarding its accuracy is based upon his technical papers in…
laelaps | January 15, 2009
The skull of Koch's "Hydrarchos".
In the summer of 1845 Albert Koch was relieved to receive a collection of Basilosaurus bones he had collected in Alabama. He had shipped the fossils ahead of him to New York, but when he arrived at the city he was told that they ship they were on had wrecked. He feared the worst, but the salvagers had saved the bones and sent them to Koch free of charge. He did not call his reconstruction Basilosaurus or "Zygodon" (as he called it in his journal, a derivation of Zeuglodon, itself synonymous with Basilosaurus), though. The bones were said to represent a…
zooillogix | October 3, 2008
Zooillogix has a lot of Belgian readers. This makes us uncomfortable. One such pale reader, Thomas Cordie, pointed us to some beautiful photos of right whales on National Geographic. Despite my temptation to just copy them all for you to enjoy, I'm posting one, and suggesting you take a look over there.
More NGC stuff below the fold:
A lion rides a horse in China for some reason.
Thanks goatrodeo.
laelaps | September 21, 2008I'm about halfway through Keith Thomson's book The Legacy of the Mastodon: The Golden Age of Fossils in America, and so far I have learned quite a bit. Even though the book covers already well-trodden ground (the "American incognitum," Cuvier's mosasaur, Mary Anning, the discovery of Hadrosaurus), Thomson also pays attention to some lesser-known paleontological personas like Ferdinand Vandiveer Hayden and G.W. Featherstonhaugh.
Although Thomson's prose is easily accessible, the book isn't particularly well-written (the short chapters are essentially outlines of particular events or persons in…
laelaps | September 12, 2008One of the most difficult things about writing about fossil whales is that so few of them have been figured in books and papers. There are a few skeletal reconstructions that are reproduced over and over and over again, but in my research some genera are only mentioned by name. Georgiacetus is one such example.
Georgiacetus is one of those neat archaeocetes that exemplifies the transition from land to water among the earliest whales. It was not fully aquatically adapted like Basilosaurus and Dorudon, but at the same time it was proportioned very differently from earlier creatures like…
laelaps | September 10, 2008For over 120 years, the origin of whales vexed paleontologists. They were among the strangest of all mammals, creatures completely adapted to the sea with more in common with us than any fish (although at the beginning of the 19th century "common sense" said otherwise), and it was difficult to imagine how they evolved. If Charles Darwin was right and all life had evolved, different evolutionary paths diverging through time, then whales must have had some sort of traceable ancestry.
The discovery of fossil whales like Basilosaurus and Squalodon illustrated that the evolution of whales may have…
laelaps | August 25, 2008This is a truly sad story. Last week a baby humpback whale, informally dubbed "Colette," was found alone in the waters off Sydney, Australia. The baby was in desperate need of fat-rich mother's milk, nuzzling boats in its attempts to find sustenance, but no surrogate mother came to the rescue. Force-feeding the young whale was not attempted and efforts to lead it out to sea (where there would at least the chance of a mother whale passing by) failed, and Colette was euthanized on Friday.
Many people were outraged, but it seems that euthanization was the only viable option. Colette was…
laelaps | August 12, 2008There are few things that make me as happy as being able to find an elusive reference or seemingly ephemeral bit of information, and this afternoon I am smiling. After almost giving up I have been able to locate Richard Harlan description of Basilosaurus, reprinted in his book Medical and Physical Researches, and available for free download. There's lots of other great papers in the book (particularly if you're interested in the scientific study of apes), and I certainly recommend that anyone with a love for dusty old science texts give it a look.
Stumbling across this collection of Harlan's…
laelaps | August 11, 2008After many false starts, breaks, and dead ends, I'm finally nearing the completion of at least one chapter of the book. I still am not entirely sure how I'm going to end it and I still have some details to fill out, but there appears to be a good chance that I'm going to finish the chapter on whale evolution on time.
Reading The Emergence of Whales has provided me with more interesting examples of the evolution of systems and adaptations, allowing me to do more than just retell the same old story. There is much more detail than I can fit in but I think it's important to relate the particulars…
laelaps | June 20, 2008
AO-4, from the Marine Mammal Science announcement. (arrow added)
On October 28, 2006, fisherman that were capturing individuals of a group of 118 bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus) near Taiji, Japan for exploitation in aquaria noticed something peculiar about one of the captured individuals. While the vast majority of dolphins have only two front flippers one particular female had a set of small pelvic flippers. Many whales (particularly baleen whales) have the vestiges of hips and leg bones inside their bodies but a whale with external pelvic fins is an even rarer find. A new paper…
laelaps | June 20, 2008During my first visits to the American Museum of Natural History in New York the only thing that impressed me more than the skeletons of the dinosaurs was the sculpture of the blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus), posed in a dive above the Hall of Ocean Life. I had seen pictures of blue whales in books and eagle-eye views of them in documentaries, but the sheer size of the cetacean astounded me (especially because I was still so small!). No trip to the museum is complete without at least peeking into the recently refurbished Milstein Hall of Ocean Life to see the whale, but what most people don…