What Did Ancient Whales See?

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The Atlantic
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Fossils help us understand extinct animals. But researchers are now using proteins from whale eyes to unlock how the marine mammals’ ancestors viewed the world, reports @JasonPDinh for @hakaimagazine:

theatlantic.com
What Did Ancient Whales See?
Scientists are examining evolutionary breadcrumbs to reconstruct the vision of whales that lived as long as 55 million years ago.
5:39 PM · Aug 7, 2022

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2022/08/ancient-whale-behavior-evolution/671067/

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https://archive.ph/BCg2r

It’s nearly impossible to know how extinct animals behaved; there’s no Jurassic Park where we can watch them hunt or mate or evade predators. But a developing technique is giving researchers a physiological cipher to decrypt the behavior of extinct species by reconstructing and analyzing extinct animals’ proteins. This molecular necromancy can help them understand traits that don’t preserve in the fossil record.

In the most recent example of this technique in action, scientists led by Sarah Dungan, who completed the work as a graduate student at the University of Toronto (U of T) in Ontario, have revived the visual pigments from some of cetaceans’ earliest ancestors. It’s given Dungan and her colleagues a new look into how proto-cetaceans would have lived in the immediate aftermath of a crucial evolutionary juncture: the time roughly 55 to 35 million years ago when the animals that eventually became whales and dolphins abandoned their terrestrial lifestyles to return to the sea.

Dungan’s fascination with whale evolution began when she was 8. As a kid, she loved spending time in the water and learning about marine biology. Her dad told her in passing that the ancestors of modern whales once lived on land. The notion that an animal could transform from living entirely out of water to not being able to live outside of it stuck with her. Learning about the evolutionary transition that modern whales took—from ocean to land and back again—“totally blew me away,” she says. “The paper is the end of a story that started when I was really young.”

In 2003, researchers at U of T pioneered a technique to recreate extinct animals’ ancient visual proteins. They’ve applied the technique across the animal kingdom, learning more about how extinct species saw the world. But studying extinct cetaceans is especially interesting because the land-to-ocean transition transformed the animals’ visual realms.

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