🔄FROM THE ARCHIVE: Over millions of years, they traded in their legs for flippers, gained blow holes and evolved into the largest creatures on Earth.
, began to adopt a more aquatic lifestyle as they abandoned a vegetarian diet, based on the way their teeth look, Thewissen says. These creatures looked a little like wolves with elongated bodies, and also lived in the India-Pakistan region. Remaining fossils of these extinct animals have only been found in rocks, which tells us that they likely spent a lot of time in shallow pools of water.
“We think they sat in the water and waited for prey to drink, similar to crocodiles,” Thewissen says.ambulocetids, at which point the creatures’ snouts becomes more elongated like crocodiles. All four limbs also shortened in these creatures. “They were much better swimmers,” Thewissen says. “[Their fossils] are found in rocks indicative of coastal environment.”
By the time remingtonocetids appeared between 49 million and 42 million years ago, the animal family began to diversify. Thewissen describes some of these animals with bodies like giant otters while others had long, thin snouts a little like“This is a phase of experimentation where different species are trying different ways of living and modifying their bodies to match,” Thewissen says.
Some of their fossil fragments are found outside of the India-Pakistan region, which shows remingtonocetids may have been able to swim long distances, Thewissen adds.The first ancestors of whales that began to take to the ocean more widely were the protocetids from 48 million to 42 million years ago, based partly on the fact that these fossils are found across the world from Pakistan to the eastern U.S. and Peru.
In any case, the general shapes change a lot in the next stage, that of the basilosaurids, so called in part because the first paleontologists to find some of the creatures believed they were some sort of sea snake. In reality, Thewissen says these are the first creatures “we would actually recognize as whales.”
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