Question

what realization has been there in ancient times regarding whale?​

Answer 1

Answer:

THIRTY-SEVEN MILLION YEARS ago, in the waters of the prehistoric Tethys Ocean, a sinuous, 50-foot-long beast with gaping jaws and jagged teeth died and sank to the seafloor.

Over thousands of millennia a mantle of sediment built up over its bones. The sea receded, and as the former seabed became a desert, the wind began to plane away the sandstone and shale above the bones. Slowly the world changed. Shifts in the Earth's crust pushed India into Asia, heaving up the Himalaya. In Africa, the first human ancestors stood up on their hind legs to walk. The pharaohs built their pyramids. Rome rose, Rome fell. And all the while the wind continued its patient excavation. Then one day Philip Gingerich showed up to finish the job.

At sunset one evening last November, Gin­gerich, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Michigan, lay full length beside the spinal column of the creature, called Basilosaurus, at a place in the Egyptian desert known as Wadi Hitan. The sand around him was strewn with fossil shark teeth, sea urchin spines, and the bones of giant catfish. "I spend so much time surrounded by these underwater creatures that pretty soon I'm living in their world," he said, prodding a log-size vertebra with his brush. "When I look at this desert, I see the ocean." Gingerich was searching for a key bit of the creature's anatomy, and he was in a hurry. The light was failing, and he needed to return to camp before his colleagues started to worry. Wadi Hitan is a beautiful but unforgiving place. Along with the bones of prehistoric sea monsters, Gingerich has found the remains of unlucky humans.

He moved down the spine toward the tail, probing around each vertebra with the handle of his brush. Then he stopped and set down the tool. "Here's the mother lode," he said. Clearing the sand delicately with his fingers, he laid bare a slender baton of bone, barely eight inches long. "It isn't every day that you see a whale's leg," he said, lifting the bone reverently in both hands.

Basilosaurus was indeed a whale, but one with two delicate hind legs, each the size of a three-year-old girl's leg, protruding from its flanks. These winsome little limbs—perfectly formed yet useless, at least for walking—are a crucial clue to understanding how modern whales, supremely adapted swimming machines, descended from land mammals that once walked on all fours. Gingerich has devoted much of his career to explaining this metamorphosis, arguably the most profound in the animal kingdom. In the process he has shown that whales, once celebrated by creationists as the best evidence against evolution, may be evolution's most elegant proof.

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