Thursday, July 28, 2022

...of a tale

The idea that whales evolved from ungulates is pretty wild. Their fins are pretty far from hooves. Also most ungulates are entirely or predominantly herbivorous, which whales and dolphins...aren't. 

It's a good idea to apply caveats. The relations are what's suggested by the evidence that we have now. Could change. Actually, that's how science is supposed to work. Still, there's a reminder in there that life will surprise you.

2 comments:

susan said...

It seems to be a pretty complex business overall; I mean why would animals already well adapted to living on land actually go back to sea in the first place? You're right too that herbivores changing their diets sounds unlikely. Maybe they had a reason but, if so, what could it be that caused them to change so much? Of course, when we're talking 10 million years all sorts of changes are possible and one thing always leads to another. I doubt we or anything vaguely resembling us will be around in 10 million years - or even 1 million. Scientists by then, whatever race they may be, will hopefully be more careful in making assumptions.

Ben said...

Among ungulates the closest thing I can think of is the hippo. Hippos do at least spend a lot of time in the water. I think they occasionally ingest some fish, too, if only by accident. But whatever process happened must have had a lot of steps to it, which we can only guess at so far.

One thing I've always wondered is, if another species did evolve to humanlike intelligence and dominance, what would they know about us? And what would they guess? If we're talking millions of years in the future, most of our artifacts will probably be gone, or degraded past recognition. We might just appear to them as a sickly species of ape.