For a closer look at Orcinus orca click here.

or this…

For a closer look at Balaenoptera acutorostrata, the Minke Whale, click here.

From this?

For a closer look at Pakicetus click here.

It took a long time and it’s going to take a number of posts.

We’re back in time a little over 50 million years. The dinosaurs have been gone for only 13 or 14 million years. Gone too are the great marine lizards. Along the shoreline of the shallow Tethys Sea, on the south coast of the landmass of Eurasia, mammals are turning their interest to an abundant realm long denied them. In nature, no available resource is ever ignored for long, and a coyote-sized animal named Pakicetus is taking the first tentative steps into the warm waters of streams and deltas in its (uppermost middle) Eocene world.

It had a long, narrow snout and brain case, close-set eyes, a robust sagittal crest, and the heavy tail of earlier archaic mammals. It also had fairly long (for the time) legs ending in small hooves. What makes Pakicetus interesting to us here however, can’t be seen in my painting. The skull has an ear region that is highly unusual in shape, and resembles the same area only in the skulls of modern and fossil whales. This feature is diagnostic for cetaceans, is found in all cetaceans, and in no other animal. Pakicetus certainly could swim, but not strongly, and perhaps foraged as a wader, or moved along the streambed like a modern hippo, feeding on crustaceans and other aquatic animals using its long vibrissae- covered snout to feel its way through the shallows.

Even earlier, lost for now in the mist-shrouded era of the Paleocene, an archaic ungulate ancestor gave rise to animals that would eventually lead to artiodactyls (even-toed hoofed animals with incredible modern diversity including; camels, deer, cattle, goats, sheep, antelope, pigs and hippos), mesonychids (carnivorous, or at least omnivorous, hoofed mammals, all now extinct), and cetaceans. The timing of exactly what diverged when is still being researched and debated. I’ll have a number of diagrams, cladograms and trees up in the near future.

As an artist and not a scientist, I’m going to leave questions of timing up to the molecular biologists and paleontologists involved, and simply supply the illustrations. I’ve been fortunate to participate in a peripheral way in a number of projects by portraying many of the creatures in the evolutionary transition back to aquatic life. You’ll be seeing most of them here in the next few months. I might even have a guest post or two from the scientists I’ve worked with.

A note on the restoration of Pakicetus

Unless you find that once-in-a-lifetime, fully articulated skeleton with skin, scale, fur or feather impressions, the further back you go in time, the more difficult the process becomes of bringing an extinct animal to life. Hopefully, any guesswork involved is educated guesswork based on comparative anatomy, but Pakicetus, as portrayed here, is based on a skull and non-articulated post-cranial material. That means it’s a composite. The bones are from a number of individuals. As more fossils are found and described, Pakicetus’ look will change. My take on any fossil-based animal is just that, my take. You can only be true to the fossil evidence you have presented to you and then try to make informed decisions about surface features and color based on possible relatives (or ecological equivalents) of your subject that are alive today and the type of environment the animal lived in.

The one thing I always do, is try to look at each animal as a completely formed individual. What I mean by that in this case, is that I didn’t think of Pakicetus as a “future whale” or an early step toward whaleness - even though it certainly was from our viewpoint. Any naturalist transported into the past would see Pakicetus as a successful creature in the world of its time. Changing conditions, differential survival, and genetic mutation would do their work, but Pakicetus lived and breathed and foraged and mated and died a complete creature.

For a closer look at Lagenorhynchus acutus, the Atlantic White-sided Dolphin, click here.

This little white-sided Dolphin - a fast, acrobatic, and conspicuous resident of the North Atlantic - is not an “end” result, but simply a glorious, present-day manifestation of Darwin’s final words in The Origin of Species: “…endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.”