The Whale - A History

In Our Time

BBC

History

4.6 • 9.2K Ratings

🗓️ 21 May 2009

⏱️ 42 minutes

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Summary

Melvyn Bragg and guests Steve Jones, Bill Amos and Eleanor Weston discuss the evolutionary history of the whale. 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.Steve Jones is Professor of Genetics at University College London; Eleanor Weston is a mammalian palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum, London; Bill Amos is Professor of Evolutionary Genetics at Cambridge University.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our
0:04.3	terms of use, please go to bbc.co.uk forward slash radio for. I hope you enjoy the program.
0:11.7	Hello, of all the wells in literature, the most famous is Moby Dick, described by Herman Melville.
0:17.7	Moby Dick moved on, still withholding from sight the full terrors of his submerged trunk,
0:23.0	entirely hiding the wretched hideousness of his jaw. But soon the four part of him slowly rose
0:28.9	from the water, and warningly waved his bananned flukes in the air, the grand god revealed himself,
0:35.6	sounded and went out of sight. Melville's novel is one of drama and grim potent, but more extraordinary
0:42.3	is the story of the whale itself. For the manor in which the whale has evolved is among the finest
0:47.6	exemplars of the changes evolution can bring to bear upon life on earth. With me to discuss the
0:53.1	evolutionary history of the whale, I'm Eleanor Weston, I'm a Malian paleontologist at the natural
0:58.2	history museum in London, Bill Amos, professor of evolutionary genetics at Cambridge University,
1:03.5	and Steve Jones, professor of genetics at university college London. Steve Jones,
1:08.8	can you give us some context for the beginnings of what turned into the whale?
1:15.6	I think whale, as well as being a sort of magnificent creature, almost a swimming metaphor,
1:21.7	as well as Melville used in, is a classic example of what might happen to humans if we land
1:27.1	on a new planet, because the whales were the first mammals really to go into the sea. The sea was
1:33.6	then 65 million years ago, a bit earlier than that. The sea was then more or less empty. It had
1:39.0	been pulsing with life with the death of the dinosaurs at that time. Many of the giant predatory
1:45.3	lizards that were in the sea had disappeared, so there was an empty world waiting to be experienced,
1:51.5	and in the very early days of whale evolution, animals perhaps a little bit like seals appeared,
1:59.1	and then you can really almost see step by step now. In this new world, which they'd entered,
2:04.9	there was endless ecological niches, as we would say, were available, endless new ways of life,
	...

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