Over the last posts, we travelled back in time to visit the first whales: four-legged, wolf-like creatures that walked the Earth 50 million years ago. We were introduced to the ever-changing paths of evolution and how scientists try to make sense of them, summoning the power of coding to trace the footprints of natural selection. […]
Imagine you’re a detective, and you’ve just arrived at a crime scene in an apartment. You hear from the police officer that someone called 911 to report a B&E (break and entering) followed by robbery. Your job is to figure out what happened, track down the burglar and retrieve the stolen items. Even though the […]
I always knew I wanted to be a whale scientist, but for a long time I had no idea what it really looked like. Things started to change when I entered university and had the opportunity of working in a research lab for the first time. The Laboratory of Evolutionary Genomics, where I did my […]
Legend: Yes, that is actually me – at ages 1 and 27. On the left, I’m sitting next to my favourite stuffed toy of a killer whale, and on the right, I’m analyzing toothed-whale DNA sequences for my PhD (which you can see in the computer screen behind me). When I was 8, I decided […]
Why was a fully aquatic whale holding on to tiny legs? This was the question we were left with in our last conversation. The first complete skeleton of a Basilosaurus, the King Lizard, revealed that these ancient whales still retained minuscule hind limbs, 30 cm long on a 16 meters body (that’s less than 2% […]
“If I might presume to express any opinion as to the animal to which these bones belong, I should venture to say that they were part of a sea monster” – H. BRY These words were written by a Louisiana farmer who discovered Basilosaurus, one of the first ancient whales formally described by science. In […]
On the last post we met Pakicetus, the ancient whale that walked on land 50 million years ago. Now you may be wondering: how did a hairy, four-legged, wolf-like creature turn into a whale? Imagine you are the first whale that ever existed. You don’t know that yet, but scientists will call you Pakicetus after […]
The picture you see is one of the oldest known ancestors of a whale: Pakicetus, an amphibious mammal that walked on land and hunted in freshwater streams 50 million years ago. With four legs, a long snout and a fully furred body, the first whale did not look like a whale at all. However, a […]
