Whale Evolution

Genesis Apologetics

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Natural history museums promote the idea that whales evolved from any number of possible mammal ancestors.

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Charles Darwin began to list the possible whale ancestors in the 1800s when he proposed that whales evolved from bears because they could be observed swimming for hours with a widely open mouth, thus catching, like a whale, insects in the water.

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He believed that natural selection eventually led to bears to becoming more and more aquatic in their structure and habits, with larger and larger mouths, till a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale.

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Fast -forwarding to the last couple of decades, leading evolutionists have developed all kinds of varying ideas about where whales come from, with the

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California Academy of Sciences claiming they came from creatures that look like hyenas, the Tokyo Institute of Science saying they came from a hippo -like creature, the

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University of Michigan claiming whales came from something that looked like a cat, the Carnegie Museum saying something like a wolf, a deer at the

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Melbourne Museum, and something like a lion at the American Museum of Natural History. Does it sound like some guesswork is at play here?

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In fact, over the years, evolutionists have proposed four different mammal orders as the possible starting place for whales.

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Today, most museums present just the broad category of cloven -hooved mammals called artiodactyls as the beginning of the whale line.

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This exempts them from having to choose a specific animal because this order includes cattle, deer, camels, pigs, goats, giraffes, antelopes, and sheep.

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But how reasonable is this theory? I mean, let's think about this for a minute. This theory claims that some unknown land mammal evolved into the dozens of whale varieties we see today, all the way from small

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Maui dolphins to 100 -foot -long blue whales weighing over 400 ,000 pounds.

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This whale has a tongue the size and weight of an African elephant and a heart the size of a small car that pumps over 2 ,000 gallons of blood.

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It can swim 30 miles per hour and dive to depths of 1 ,500 feet while holding its breath, and it does this with an uncanny efficiency that baffles scientists today.

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Does it really make sense that such an ocean -fit creature evolved from a land -dwelling mammal? I mean, to go from a land mammal to a giant blue whale, some serious changes would need to take place, like growing from 5 to 6 feet long to 100, weighing less than 150 pounds to over 400 ,000 pounds, diving less than 8 feet underwater to over 1 ,500 feet, and special collapsing lungs to be able to do this, changing from teeth to baleen filters, going from a tubular tail to a wide fluke for propulsion by means of a ball vertebra so it can move up and down instead of side to side, along with a new package of muscles and new chevron bones to connect them to, going from front legs for running to flippers for steering and losing the back legs altogether, moving the nasal passages from the tip of the snout to the top of the head, intaking fresh water to salt water, and changed kidneys to handle it, insulation from fur to blubber, external to internal ears capable of hearing mates 500 miles away.

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And this is just a starter list. Let's check out a short clip by Illustra Media titled, Living Waters, Intelligent Design in the

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Ocean of the Earth, that clearly demonstrates how a land creature turning into a whale is impossible, even relying on evolutionary models.

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The Darwinian narrative of whale evolution is familiar. A four -legged terrestrial mammal, the size of a wolf or sheep, undergoes a series of gradual biological changes over millions of years.

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The standard textbook account I take to be artistic license, when you look at the problem of being a land mammal that finds itself, speaking loosely, in an aquatic environment, and you've got to conduct your everything there, including reproduction, you have to have the coming together of a number of adaptations.

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And that is unfathomably complicated. The scale of these adaptations would have to be massive, including a remodel of the skull and muscles to move the nostrils to the top of the head, the conversion of front legs into flippers, a reconstruction of the skeleton, including a ball joint that allowed the tail to move up and down, the transformation of a few dozen teeth into hundreds of plates lined with brush -like fibers, the reorganization of kidney tissues to accommodate the intake of salt water, lungs dramatically enlarged and renovated to withstand the intense pressure of deep dives, the inclusion of a blubber layer for insulation in cold water, and modifications of ears, eyes, and skin to work effectively in an aquatic environment.

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Think of all the parameters that would have to be modified, and then multiply that by,

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I don't know, a thousand fold, or more than that. That's the scale of the problem that you're dealing with.

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In the context of Darwinian evolution, the most crucial adaptations would involve the male reproductive system.

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To optimize the whale's mobility in water, its reproductive organs would have to move from the exterior of the animal's torso to inside its abdominal cavity.

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But to produce sperm, the internalized testes must be cooled and kept below core body temperature.

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Unless it's kept below, you'd have no sperm production, period. And in evolutionary terms, sterility means it's a no -go.

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You don't count in the race of life, so to speak. One of the necessary conditions of natural selection is the ability to reproduce.

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You can't have natural selection if you don't have reproductive capability. You can't make the sperm, you can't have reproduction, you can't get natural selection operating.

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So you've got to solve this engineering problem. As a male humpback swims, it generates heat, raising its body temperature.

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To prevent sterility, the whale relies on a refrigeration mechanism designed into its circulatory system.

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In the non -insulated regions of the dorsal fin and tail, blood is cooled and then transported through a network of veins to the whale's abdomen.

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Here beneath a layer of muscles, a web of veins and arteries surround the testes.

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They are arranged so blood flows in alternate directions, and heat from the warm arteries radiates to the cooler veins.

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This transfer lowers the temperature of the blood to a safe level before it is channeled to the reproductive organs.

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It's a remarkable solution to that problem. It's beautiful. It's anatomically complex.

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It involves what is called, borrowing from the Latin, a miraculous web of arteries and veins.

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But can you explain it by some smooth, gradualistic, textbook scenario, little change, little change, fixation?

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No, it doesn't fit the Darwinian model. In my opinion, you're looking at just a suite of characters that had to have been integrated from the get -go.

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I mean, it's a non -gradualistic type of change. So, the cooling system makes sense because you have internalized reproductive glands.

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The internalized reproductive glands, however, are a no -go unless you've got the cooling system.

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You can't explain the emergence of one without the other. Since 2001, biologist

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Richard Sternberg has used widely accepted data on mutation rates and population genetics to study the

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Darwinian model for whale evolution. Sternberg has focused his research on natural selection and the probability of coordinated mutations, the genetic errors in a

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DNA molecule required for macroevolutionary change. I mean,

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I say it's a numbers game. You have to explain it in terms of a number of coincident mutations that just happened to arise and be put into right combinations to reshape the vertebral column, to reshape the musculature, the nervous system, the eyes, the ears, and on and on and on.

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So let's imagine that the transformation you wish to achieve is transforming a leg from a terrestrial mammal into the flipper of a fully aquatic mammal like a dolphin or a whale.

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Now, we look at our set of mutations that are required. Let's say we've got A that's going to affect the bones.

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But you think about your own limb. It's not just bones. There are muscles and tendons and nerves and associated behaviors.

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So you look down your list of mutations and you go, well, I've got A starting my transformation, but I need

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B, C, D, E, and F as well. So the challenge of cooperative mutations is to have these events occur in space and time in such a way that they can jointly work together, cooperate, to bring about the transformation that you need.

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But you know what? Those mutations, they're accidents in the genetic material. They just happen.

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So you're essentially relying on luck. And odds are you're going to miss the target by a mile.

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In 2008, researchers at Cornell University calculated the time required to generate randomly a single pair of cooperative mutations in a population of large mammals.

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Richard Sternberg applied these calculations to his ongoing analysis. And they came to the conclusion that sure you can get these two coordinated mutations, but it is a problem.

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It's a problem because you need, as far as we know, on the order of well over 100 million years to give you the coordinated mutations that would just two, that would give you some beneficial modification.

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And by my reckoning, to account for the transformation that you'd see, you need far more than two mutations.

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If two cooperative mutations are established in a population of mammals only once in a million centuries, then a significant challenge to the

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Darwinian model rises from the dust of the earth. According to the most generous interpretations of the fossil record, the longest possible time frame for the theorized evolution of a land -dwelling animal into a whale is 9 million years.

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That's a fraction of the 100 million years required to produce a single pair of cooperative mutations and just one of the countless anatomical changes necessary for natural selection to succeed.

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So when you just plug in the math and there are various ways, I mean, what you've done is you've exceeded the time that the geological record provides you with.

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And then you start saying, okay, now I'm going to rely on these coordinated changes and it's kind of game over.

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You don't have to have a PhD in mathematics or population genetics to see where this is heading.

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Even if I grant you millions and millions of years, 5, 10, 50, 100 million years to bring about this transformation, you still face these very real limits of population size, mutation rate, generation time, and the number of features that have to be modified.

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If the process in question is not going to happen, it's not going to happen and it really doesn't matter how much time you have.

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So have all the time you want. If this transition occurred, it did not occur by an undirected

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Darwinian process. That simply is not possible biologically. Darwinism provided an explanation for the appearance of design and argued that there is no designer, or if you will, the designer is natural selection.

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If that's out of the way, if that just does not explain the evidence, then the flip side of that is, well, things appear designed because they are designed.

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But what about the fossil record? Does it reflect a clear lineup progression that moves from land mammals to whales?

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Let's hear from famous evolutionist Richard Dawkins as he reviews how he thinks the fossils line up to support the evolutionary view.

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People often say, where are the intermediate fossils? Show us your intermediate fossils. There are plenty of intermediate fossils and one of the best examples is whales.

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The modern whales are up there. Here's a series of fossils back in time, Dorodon about 36 million years ago,

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Rhodocetus about 47 .5 million years, Pachycetus about 48 .5 million years.

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You can see they form a lovely series of intermediates. As you go from old to young,

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Pachycetus, Rhodocetus, gradually losing the hind legs to Dorodon, which has almost lost the hind legs completely.

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Modern whales have completely lost the hind legs. There are some vestigial bones, some remnant bones buried deep inside the body.

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A lovely series of intermediates getting progressively more and more specialized in living in the sea.

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When it comes to Dawkins' first icon, Arteodactyl, remember that this is just a wide category of even -toed animals, including goats, sheep, camels, pigs, cows, and deer.

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Other than just saying so, there's no evidence connecting this entire group of animals to whales. By suggesting that whales evolved from some ancient

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Arteodactyl, evolutionists admit that they do not have a real fossil connecting whales to other mammals.

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Instead, they reach for an imaginary not -yet -found ancestor, and the precise animal that fills this slot depends on which museum you go to.

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The next in the lineup is Pachycetus. Dr. Gingrich discovered this creature and named it the

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Whale of Pakistan, claiming it was the oldest and most primitive whale yet discovered. This bold statement was based on a few parts of the skull that were found, but they had no fossil evidence below the head.

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Yet, this did not stop them from illustrating this creature with flipper hands and feet and a swishy fin for a tail on the front cover of Science Magazine.

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Some museums even boldly displayed it with a blowhole way up the snout and paddle -like feet and hands.

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All this while no fossils of flippers, arm, leg, or lower snout bones had been found.

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All this changed by 2001, after four more partial skulls and 150 additional

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Pachycetus bones had been discovered, all of which clearly proved that this creature was 100 % land animal.

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Based on these new findings, researchers even said that Pachycetus were good runners, moving with only their digits touching the ground.

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These new findings led to the conclusion that Pachycetus was no more amphibious than a tapir, a browsing mammal living today in South America which is similar to pigs but with longer snouts.

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Pachycetus models had to be changed to add running legs, hoofed feet, and not paddles, a longer neck, eyes on top of its head, and nasal passages were moved from the middle of the snout to the front.

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Surprisingly, some museums still display the original whale -like Pachycetus, not the 2001 land animal version based on the additional fossil discoveries.

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Next we have Rhodocetus, which is based on a fossil found in Pakistan in 1992 and is now represented by three fossil finds.

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Many textbooks and museums show Rhodocetus with flippers for feet, a long tail, and a fluke -like whale's half.

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Even though they only found a few vertebrae that followed the pelvis, Dr. Gingrich, the paleontologist most responsible for the reconstruction and presentation of Rhodocetus, added a prominent long tail complete with a whale fluke and flipper feet to the

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Rhodocetus display at the Natural History Museum at the University of Michigan. When interviewed about these three whale -like features

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Dr. Gingrich included on Rhodocetus, you won't believe what he admitted. When this video series was being filmed on location at the

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University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, the executive producer noticed a discrepancy between museum drawings of Rhodocetus and the fossils.

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The reconstruction of Rhodocetus had a whale fluke, but there were no fossils of the tail to confirm this.

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Dr. Phil Gingrich, the scientist responsible for the discovery and reconstruction of Rhodocetus, was questioned how he knew there was a whale fluke on Rhodocetus, since that part of the fossil was missing.

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What was the reasoning that the scientists think there was a fluke on Rhodocetus based on the other pieces of anatomy?

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Well, I told you we don't have the tail in Rhodocetus, so we don't know for sure whether it had a ball vertebra indicating a fluke or not.

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So I speculated it might have had a fluke. Scientist Gingrich also acknowledged that the flippers were drawn on the diagram without these fossils.

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Now, he does not believe this animal had flippers. Again, his answer was surprising, since the museum diagrams had flippers on Rhodocetus.

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Now since then, we've found the forelimbs, the hands, and the front arm, the arms in other words of Rhodocetus.

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And we understand that it doesn't have the kind of arms that can be spread out like flippers are on a whale.

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And if you don't have flippers, I don't think you can have a fluke tail and really powered swimming. And so I now doubt that Rhodocetus would have had a fluke tail.

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Many experts consider whales to be the best fossil evidence for evolution, but are unaware of these discrepancies.

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So no long tail, no fluke, and no flipper feet. This creature sure doesn't seem like much of a whale, or even close to becoming one.

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Finally, we have Dorodon. These animals are simply extinct whales. They had nostril openings, blowholes on top of their skulls, measured about 50 feet long, and lived in the water full time.

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Let's wrap up by looking at the idea that some whales have vestigial legs or hips that are supposedly evolutionary leftovers from when whales walked on land.

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Museums frequently highlight these structures in whale skeletons, claiming this evolutionary story along with them.

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While some museums still display this as supposed evidence for evolution, scientists now know that these bones are actually reproductive claspers that are necessary to join multi -ton animals tightly together while mating in water and swimming.

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In fact, one of the studies that revealed this discovery was actually published in the journal called Evolution.

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So much for leftover mammal legs and hips. What we can know for certain regarding this supposed story of whale evolution is that its theories have often changed.

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Bears, Mesonychs, Pakicetus, and several different mammal orders rotated through as possible ancestors.

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The biblical viewpoint, however, remains unchanged. Whales were created as whales just thousands of years ago on the fifth day of creation.

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The different whale kinds express variation but stay within their created kinds. Some of them did not survive the flood, but many are still alive today, filling the earth with God's glory.

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Looking for answers about what the Bible teaches about creation, the fossil record, dinosaurs? Download the

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Genesis Apologetics app from the iTunes or Google Play stores for answers to these questions and more.