"The media are currently abuzz with claims of a newly discovered fossil from Egypt: a “four-legged whale.” Here are some prominent headlines:
- NPR: “Scientists Discover Fossil Of A 4-Legged Whale With A Raptor-Like Eating Style”
- Newsweek: “Scientists have found the fossil of a deadly 4-legged whale that had a jackal-like head and lived both on land and in the sea”
- New York Post: “Fossil of previously unknown four-legged whale found in Egypt”
- BBC: “New species of ancient four-legged whale discovered in Egypt”
And so on. The headlines are accompanied by an artist’s depiction of what was supposedly found. See above. The image is attributed to one of the co-authors of the technical paper, geologist Robert W. Boessenecker.
The NPR story warns:
We regret to inform you that your nightmares are about to get worse.
A team led by Egyptian scientists have dug up a 43 million-year-old fossil in the Sahara Desert in Egypt of a now-extinct amphibious four-legged whale.
That’s right, folks — a whale with legs.
The problem with these claims? That’s right, folks — they didn’t find any of the fossil’s legs. Everything you just read about this fossil is the product of imagination. In fact, if you check the technical paper you’ll learn that they found very little of
the fossil at all.Also absent: the pelvis, the vast majority of ribs and vertebrae, and the front portion of the snout. Undoubtedly the organism had these bones, but to call this a “whale with legs,” or to unequivocally depict it as some species transitional between terrestrial mammals and whales (as seen above), is to impose a huge amount of evolutionary imagination on the situation.
Was It a Whale?
Consistent with all of this, the paper notes in the abstract that what they did find was “a partial skeleton,” later stating, “The new species is based on a partial skeleton.”an associated partial skeleton of a single individual including the cranium, the right mandible, incomplete left mandible, isolated teeth, the fifth cervical, and the sixth thoracic vertebrae and ribs. The holotype is the only known specimen.
Actually, I
take that back. Belief — belief in an evolutionary paradigm — is the
thing that’s driving these headlines. Is it any wonder that people don’t trust overhyped evolutionary claims made by the media, or by some scientists?" EN&V