This isn’t a scene from a science fiction movie. It’s the real story of Ambulocetus, the “walking whale,” whose fossilized remains have shattered our understanding of how modern whales ...

The past two decades have changed all that, and whale evolution now is one of the best examples of macroevolution documented in the fossil record. In The Walking Whales, I revisit the evolutionary ...

In The Mystery of the Walking Whale, a new documentary from The Nature of Things, host Sarika Cullis-Suzuki joins them on a search for answers that takes her from the tropical waters of the ...

Imagine looking at a majestic blue whale gliding effortlessly through the ocean, the largest animal on Earth. Now, picture that same creature’s distant ancestor, not swimming, but walking on ...

These winsome little limbs—perfectly formed yet useless, at least for walking—are a crucial clue to understanding how modern whales, supremely adapted swimming machines, descended from land ...

But they’re descended from a long line of four-legged animals—including the remarkable-looking ambulocetus, or “walking whale”—a mammal that resembled a crocodile in shape. Although all ...

(I wrote about this transition in my book At the Water’s Edge.) By 40 million years ago, the walking whales were long gone. In their place were species like Dorudon atrox. As you can see from ...

Despite what you may think, the earliest ancestor of the whale was a land-walking mammal called the Pakicetus. Even though whales are aquatic, the Pakicetus was a four-legged land animal.