Whales Once Had Legs

For more than one hundred and fifty million years, the mammals lived in the dark. Small, furry, active at night, hiding in burrows beneath the feet of the giants. Then the giants were gone, and for the first time, the small ones could walk in the daylight. What they did with that daylight changed everything. In about ten million years, animals the size of a rat had descendants as large as a cow. Plant eaters grew horns and hooves, hunters grew longer jaws, and some escaped the race entirely by taking to the air: the first bats. Others escaped toward the sea. The great marine reptiles had disappeared, and the seas were full of fish with almost no one to hunt them. Around fifty million years ago, a wolf sized mammal with toes tipped with small hooves began hunting fish in shallow rivers. Its closest living relative today is the hippopotamus. Within a few million years, its descendants looked like furry crocodiles. Their legs shrank, their feet became paddles, their nostrils moved to the top of the head, and by forty million years ago an eighteen meter animal was swimming the open ocean. The whales still carry proof of where they came from: they move their tails up and down, the same way a running dog bends its spine. But the most important change in the mammals was in the way they raised their young. Milk, long years of care, and a brain layer found only in mammals, the neocortex, expanding until it folded over itself. Mammals began to remember not only what other animals were, but who they were. And that changed what it meant to lose someone. In Connection, this is the birth of sadness. Not pity for the one who died, but sorrow for what will never happen again. In 2018, an orca mother carried her dead calf for seventeen days, across more than a thousand kilometers of ocean, before she let it go. Original ambient music by Valar Dfraog. 00:00 A hundred and fifty million years in the dark 00:30 Into the daylight 00:50 Room to grow 01:05 The first bats 01:20 Escape to the sea 01:35 A hunter with hooves 01:55 The furry crocodile 02:20 Leaving the shore 02:45 The gallop in the ocean 03:05 Milk and memory 03:35 Someone, not one of many 04:00 The birth of sadness 04:20 The orca who would not let go 04:45 Next: the primates #whales #evolution #mammals #animalgrief #consciousness #flyrooted