Whales: From Land to Sea

A couple of months ago I read Carl Zimmer's book, At The Water's Edge, which deals with the transition of aquatic life to land and back again. The "back again" part concerns the evolution of cetaceans (whales, dolphins, etc.) If you are interested in these two steps in evolution then you should read the book.

Now Zimmer has a post dealing with whale evolution and the creationist attack thereon. Here are a few links to go along with it.

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The webpage of the Thewissen lab is definately worth exploring. (Thewissen is a major player in the discovery of transitional whale fossils.)

This article, originally from the NCSE has some good background information, although it looks slightly out of date. One of Thewissen's important papers was published in Nature about a month after the above article was posted on talk.origins.

And then there is this illustration of whale transition--and this too.

Although not a scholarly source, Wikipedia seems to have a pretty good page.

On a final note, a reminder of why gap arguments are a bad idea:

"Finally, and most glaringly obvious, if random evolution is true there must have been a large number of transitional forms between the mesonychid and the ancient whale: Where are they? It seems like quite a coincidence that of all the intermediate species that must have existed between the mesonychid and whale, only species that are very similar to the end species have been found."

- Michael J. Behe

Anti-Darwinian, Intelligent Design conjecturist,
writing against the validity of evolution less than a year before three transitional species between whales and land-dwelling Eocene Mesonychids were found.

P.S. I forgot to include this. Note that not all relationships are set in stone.