Pakicetus Pronunciation

Fun Facts

• ✓Pakicetus had bones so dense and heavy that scientists believe it used them like a diver's weight belt, sinking effortlessly to the bottom of rivers to ambush prey.
• ✓Although Pakicetus looked nothing like a whale, a tiny bone inside its ear called the involucrum is shaped in a way found only in whales and their relatives, which is how scientists confirmed it belongs in the whale family tree.
• ✓The closest living relative of Pakicetus and all whales is the hippopotamus, making hippos and dolphins distant cousins, a connection scientists only confirmed through DNA evidence in the 1990s.
• ✓Pakicetus lived about 50 million years ago in what was then a shallow coastal region of the ancient Tethys Sea, a now-vanished ocean that once separated Europe and Asia from Africa.
• ✓Within just 15 million years of Pakicetus walking the land, its whale descendants had fully lost their legs, grown tail flukes, and become completely aquatic, one of the fastest major evolutionary transformations in mammal history.