The Whale - A History

21 May, 2009 570 Biology

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.

→ Listen on BBC Sounds website

Guests

  • Steve Jones 22 episodes
    Professor of Genetics at University College London
  • Bill Amos No other episodes
    Professor of Evolutionary Genetics at Cambridge University
  • Eleanor Weston No other episodes
    Mammalian palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum, London

Related episodes

Experimental. For more related episodes, visit the visual explorer.

Programme ID: b00kfqm6

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00kfqm6

Auto-category: 576.8 (Whales)

Hello (First sentence from this episode) Hello. Of all the whales in literature, the most famous is Moby Dick, described by Herman Melville.