The Fairy Tale of the Walking Whale

The most amusing thing about this most recent discovery is that it is an absolute given that the science fetishists will either A. try and rationalize this complete change of the evolutionary timeline in whale development or B. Downplay the discovery as if they had their doubts about the entire timeline all along...

"In an article titled "Ancient whale jawbone found in Antarctica", the Associated Press reports that paleontologists have found "the oldest fully aquatic whale yet discovered," which is about 49 million years old. As we've discussed here on ENV in the past, whale evolution has faced problems because of the short timescale (~10 million years) allowed by the fossil record for whales to evolve from fully terrestrial mammals to fully aquatic whales. As Richard Sternberg has argued (see here, here or here), the many anatomical changes necessary to convert a land-mammal to a whale could not take place by Darwinian evolution even in 10 million years. There just isn't time. But this new fossil might imply that the amount of time available was actually less than 5 million years.

Until now, the whale series went something like this:
Pakicetids (fully terrestrial): ~50 mya
Ambulocetids (semi-aquatic): 49 mya
Remingtonocetids (semi-aquatic): 49 mya
Rodhocetus (a Protocetid, semi-aquatic): 47 mya
Basilosaurids (fully aquatic): 40 mya

So under the previous timeline, Darwinian biologists didn't have to worry about accounting for the origin of fully aquatic whales until about 40 mya. This new find pushes fully aquatic whales back to 49 mya. Now the timeline looks something like this:

Pakicetids (fully terrestrial): ~50 mya
New Fossil Jawbone (fully aquatic whale): 49 mya
Ambulocetids (semi-aquatic): 49 mya
Remingtonocetids (semi-aquatic): 49 mya
Rodhocetus (a Protocetid, semi-aquatic): 47 mya
Basilosaurids (fully aquatic): 40 mya"

Dr David Berlinsky mentions the monumental obstacles that evolution would have had to overcome in this particular example in this short, two minute video from a couple of years ago. I admit that I found such claims to be highly dubious from the start and it seems that my suspicions were proven correct. (Above: So-called whale predecessor Pakicetus)


"In North America the black bear was seen by Hearne swimming for hours with widely open mouth, thus catching, like a whale, insects in the water. Even in so extreme a case as this, if the supply of insects were constant, and if better adapted competitors did not already exist in the country, I can see no difficulty in a race of bears being rendered, by natural selection, more and more aquatic in their structure and habits, with larger and larger mouths, till a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale."—Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (1859 and 1984 editions), p. 184. Link