Evolution What the Fossils Say and Why it Matters

Bossies and Blowholes 335 the latest Eocene, these elephant-sized beasts sported a pair of blunt bony battering rams on their no ...

336 Evolution? The Fossils Say YES! divide not the hoof, therefore they are unclean unto you. And the swine, because it divideth ...

Bossies and Blowholes 337 Yet once again, a look at the first known artiodactyls from the early Eocene reveals a form that no on ...

FIGURE 14.13. The evolution of camels in North America. (A) The family tree of camels, showing the great diversity of forms, fro ...

Bossies and Blowholes 339 how they evolved into a wide diversity of forms in the Oligocene and Miocene. For space reasons, we’ll ...

340 Evolution? The Fossils Say YES! nearly fused into a cannon bone, and the signature features of the skull and skeleton as wel ...

FIGURE 14.14. Evolution of the giraffe family. (A) The modern okapi is more typical of the group, with its short neck and relati ...

FIGURE 14.15. Neck vertebrae of a recently discovered fossil giraffid, Samotherium major, that are intermediate in length betwee ...

Bossies and Blowholes 343 People are startled to learn that most fossil rhinos didn’t have horns, most fossil camels didn’t have ...

344 Evolution? The Fossils Say YES! The next development occurred a few years later, when Gingerich et al. (1990) described new ...

Bossies and Blowholes 345 body!), which clearly did not function for locomotion. Like the vestigial hind limbs of mod- ern whale ...

FIGURE 14.18. Ambulocetus natans, the primitive whale from the Eocene of Pakistan that still retains a mesonychid- like head, la ...

Bossies and Blowholes 347 a link between Pakicetus and the primitive land relatives of whales and hippos known as anthracotheres ...

348 Evolution? The Fossils Say YES! Now that we have seen that most of the popular large hoofed mammals—horses, rhinos, cam- els ...

Bossies and Blowholes 349 their close relationship. There are many details of the skull and jaw, and even of the teeth, that clo ...

FIGURE 14.20. Details of the evolution of the skull, tusks, and trunk of proboscideans, from the pygmy hippo-like Moeritherium t ...

Bossies and Blowholes 351 in no other group of mammals and is strong evidence for a clade of Proboscidea plus Sirenia that McKen ...

352 Evolution? The Fossils Say YES! hands and feet! One could not imagine a better transitional form: a creature with all the sk ...

Bossies and Blowholes 353 Prehistoric Mammals. In the previous chapter, we saw a plethora of transitional forms among the other ...

FIGURE 15.1. Satirical cartoon from Darwin’s time, posing the question that most British were struggling with: Are we an ape’s r ...