The Whale - A History
The ancestor of all whales alive today was a small, land-based mammal with cloven hoofs, perhaps like a pig or a big mole. How this creature developed into the celebrated leviathan of the deep is one of the more extraordinary stories in the canon of evolution. The whale has undergone vast changes in size, has moved from land to water, lost its legs and developed specialised features such as filter feeding and echo location. How it achieved this is an exemplar of how evolution works and how natural selection can impose extreme changes on the body shape and abilities of living things. How the story of the whales was pieced together also reveals the various forms of evidence - from fossils to molecules - that we now use to understand the ancestry of life on Earth.
→ Listen on BBC Sounds website (UK only)
→ Or listen on: Apple Podcasts
Guests
- Steve Jones
22 episodes
Professor of Genetics at University College London -
Eleanor Weston No other episodes
Mammalian palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum, London -
Bill Amos No other episodes
Professor of Evolutionary Genetics at Cambridge University
Related episodes
-
The Fish-Tetrapod Transition
20 Oct, 2022 570 Biology -
The Evolution of Crocodiles
16 Sep, 2021 560 Fossils and prehistoric life -
Mammals
13 Oct, 2005 560 Fossils and prehistoric life -
The Evolution of Lungs
12 Jun, 2025 570 Biology -
Human Evolution
16 Feb, 2006 590 Animals (Zoology) -
The Evolution of Teeth
11 Apr, 2019 590 Animals (Zoology) -
Human Origins
27 Apr, 2000 590 Animals (Zoology) -
The Evolution of Horses
27 Feb, 2020 590 Animals (Zoology) -
The Origins of Life
23 Sep, 2004 570 Biology -
The Cambrian Period
17 Feb, 2005 550 Earth sciences and geology
Programme ID: b00kfqm6
Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00kfqm6
Auto-category: 599.5 (Cetacea)
Hello (First sentence from this episode)
Hello. Of all the whales in literature, the most famous is Moby Dick, described by Herman Melville.