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Thursday, Dec 20, 2007
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Whale ancestry enigma

Did cetaceans descend from deer-like critter?

WASHINGTON: It sounds like a stretch, but a new study suggests that the missing evolutionary link between whales and land animals is a raccoon-sized animal that looks like a long-tailed deer without antlers, or an overgrown long-legged rat.

The creature is called Indohyus, and fossils recently dug up from the Kashmir region reveal some crucial evolutionary similarities between it and water-dwelling cetaceans, such as whales, dolphins and porpoises.

The hippopotamus has been the leading candidate for the closest land relative because of its similar DNA and whale-like features. So some scientists were sceptical of the hypothesis published on Thursday in Nature.

Still, some researchers have been troubled that hippos seem to have lived in the wrong part of the world and popped up too recently to be a whale ancestor. India and Pakistan were the general region where early whales lived.

Newer fossils point to the deer-like Indohyus. The animal is a “missing link” to the sister species to ancient whales, said Hans Thewissen, Professor of Anatomy at the Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine.

“As a zoo animal, it looks nothing like a whale,” he said. But when it comes to anatomical features, the Indohyus “is quite strikingly like one.”

Professor Thewissen studied hundreds of Indohyus bones unearthed from mudstone in Kashmir. From that cache of bones he created a composite skeleton of a 48 million-year-old creature.

The fact that the Indian subcontinent was where the early whales lived explains the match with the Indohyus but not the early African hippos, Professor Thewissen said. — AP

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