Whales and Hippos Could Be Two of a Kind
From Times Staff and Wire Reports
A second look at some 40-million-year-old fossils provides a missing link to suggest that the closest living relative of whales is the hippo, a group of scientists said Monday.
Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team from UC Berkeley, the University of Poitiers in France and the University of N’djamena in Chad proposed a theory that whales and hippos had a common water-loving ancestor 50 to 60 million years ago. From it evolved early cetaceans, which gradually moved into the water full time, and a diverse group of pig-like animals called anthracotheres.
