Hitan" in Arabic, holds more than 400 primitive whale skeletons that offer a snapshot of the evolution of these creatures ...

Trees can provide the additional information about evolutionary relationships that researchers need in order to figure out, with enough certainty, which species of whale a piece of meat has come from.

Whale Evolution: Call it an unfinished story, but with a plot that's a grabber. It's the tale of an ancient land mammal making its way back to the sea, becoming the forerunner of today's whales.

Gray, blue, big, bigger: baleen whales put the mega in “megafauna.” ... Charles Darwin posited that evolution can be represented by a tree, with each species as one of the branches.

Picture this: you’re gazing into a vibrant aquarium, entranced by the hypnotic dance of fish. But what if I told you that ...

This is the evolutionary tree of sperm whales, showing the relationships of extinct and living species, and when reduction of the spermaceti organ took place. Disclaimer: AAAS and EurekAlert! are ...

Looking deeper by mapping the skull markers onto the cetacean phylogenetic tree, she and a team of fellow whale experts and evolutionary modelers could infer when particular changes in structure had ...

The discovery “helps clarify parts of the evolutionary tree and pushes back some of the changes we thought were happening,” said paleobiologist Nicholas Pyenson, curator of fossil marine ...

The discovery “helps clarify parts of the evolutionary tree and pushes back some of the changes we thought were happening,” said paleobiologist Nicholas Pyenson, curator of fossil marine ...

The long periods of time that whales must hold their breath to dive and hunt also seem to have spurred genetic changes. Diving deep, as scuba divers know, means little bubbles of nitrogen can form ...

Then, in the late 1990s, genetic data confirmed that whales were part of the same evolutionary line that spawned cows, pigs, and camels — a branch called artiodactyla.