How well do you know the ocean?
This regular feature from Ocean First Education will help acquaint you with our blue planet.
Topic: Cetaceans Over Time
1 Topic : 5 Facts
Every whale, dolphin, and porpoise is the descendant of land-dwelling mammals that completed their return to the sea around 40 million years ago.
Like all mammals, the cetaceans are warm-blooded, give birth to live young, the mothers produce milk to sustain their young, and they even have sparse hair at some point in their development.
The cetaceans are most closely related to the artiodactyls which are represented by cows, pigs, hippos, sheep, giraffes, and camels.
The transition from land to sea took approximately 12 million years, as measured by the current fossil record.
The division between baleen whales and toothed whales happened around the same time, about 30 million years ago during the late Eocene.
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SEVENSEAS - 97