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Sep 30 2009 - 11:21am
Whales have existed for million of years. Watch this animation, from the Sant Ocean Hall, to see how they evolved from land-dwellers to the animals we know today. Discover more about whale evolution in our Ocean Over Time interactive. Note: this video contains no audio.
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Jun 17 2011 - 11:03am
My graduate student Jorge and I are departing today for Panama, to excavate a fossil whale that was discovered by an undergraduate student working with Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute researcher Aaron O'Dea.
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Sep 20 2011 - 4:36pm
Crinoids (echinoderms related to sea stars and sea urchins) dominate the Paleozoic shallow water habitat in this illustration. They evolved a variety of stalk heights, which enabled them to capture food at different levels above the sea floor. The base of their stalks was modified to anchor the...
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Jan 26 2010 - 11:45am
A life-sized model suspended over visitors at the San Diego Natural History Museum shows what an ancient shark, the Giant Megatooth (Carcharodon megalodon), might have looked like.
More about the great white shark can be found in our Great White Shark featured story
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Sep 12 2011 - 11:43am
Offshore Peru, during the Eocene (~56-34 million years ago), showing three archaeocetes (ancient whales), along with a previously described fossil penguin.
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Jun 22 2011 - 2:48pm
Paeleobiologist Dr. Nicholas Pyenson, Curator of Fossil Marine Mammals for the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History (NMNH), set out with Jorge Velez-Juarbe, NMNH Research Student and Ph. D. Candidate at Howard University and Aaron O'Dea from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute...
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Feb 26 2013 - 10:35am
Two fossilized teeth from a megalodon (Carcharodon megalodon) dating back more than 20 million years.
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Dec 14 2010 - 12:22pm
David Bohaska, Museum Specialist - Vertebrate Paleontology, Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History
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Nov 16 2012 - 6:05pm
For the last 150 years, paleontologists have debated the origins of the great white shark. Many believe that they descended from the 50-foot megalodon, also known as the megatooth shark (Carcharocles megalodon), which is often imagined to be a vastly inflated great white. But after the discovery of...
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May 7 2012 - 3:34pm
The whales that we see in today's world can broadly be split into two groups: those with teeth (odontocetes), and those that have baleen (mysticetes) instead of teeth. These two groups share a common ancestor in the Eocene, which had teeth (They looked a lot like the ancient whale skeletons in the...
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Mar 26 2010 - 1:09pm
Brian Huber studies fossil organisms known as “forams” to learn about climate change in this video snippet from the Smithsonian Marine Collections video.
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Jun 18 2011 - 10:06am
A fossil vertebra that a Smithsonian researcher's mother found while prospecting in the Gatun Formation. It's not just any vertebra, it belongs to a fossil sea cow! According to Jorge Valez-Juarbe, a graduate student at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History and expert on fossil sea...
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Jan 26 2010 - 11:45am
A scientific illustration of the most powerful fish of its time, Carcharodon megalodon, which swam the ocean 30 million years ago. This shark may have reached a size of 20 meters/66 feet. Meet other ancient top predators and modern great white sharks.
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Jun 23 2011 - 11:20am
A time-lapse video shows researchers from the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History and Smithsonian's Tropical Research Institute racing to excavate the fossil of an extinct toothed whale on a beach in Piña, Panama. The fossil is from the Squalodontidae group, commonly known as "shark-...
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Aug 15 2012 - 9:45am
The fossil tooth whorl of the ancient shark Helicoprion, dating back 290 million years before present. For a long time, people didn't know what the shark looked like—but, thanks to a CT scan of a fossil, researchers finally put the pieces together in 2013. Read more about this story in our ...
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Mar 21 2013 - 9:20am
This well-preserved fossil is the only intact partial skull ever found of a white shark that lived about 6.5 million years ago called Carcharodon hubbelli. The fossil jaw contains 222 teeth, some in rows up to six teeth deep, and may provide evidence that modern day great white sharks evolved from...
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Sep 12 2011 - 2:08pm
George Mason University professor Mark D. Uhen and Dr. Matthew Lewin of the University of California, San Francisco, survey rocks of the Paracas Formation, in the southern part of Peru's Pisco Basin. The two were part of a team that discovered South America's oldest fossil whales, to date.
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May 11 2012 - 9:58am
Editor's note: Read Nick's first blog post about "toothed" baleen whales to see what their team is excavating on Vancouver Island.
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Sep 30 2011 - 6:38am
Smithsonian curator of fossil marine mammals Nick Pyenson and a team of collaborators are heading into Chile's Atacama Desert, shown here. They'll study a rich bonebed of fossil marine vertebrates that lived off the Chilean coast around 8 million years ago.
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Jan 26 2012 - 12:23pm
Jorge Velez-Juarbe is Predoctoral Fellow in the Department of Paleobiology at Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.
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Aug 21 2012 - 8:51am
This early whale was well suited to life at sea. But it also lived on land. An ancestor of the right whale, Maiacetus lived 49-40 million years ago. It had flipper-like limbs and webbed feet, like modern seals. But it also had ankle bones - clues that although Maiacetus swam, its...
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Jun 18 2011 - 10:19am
Jorge and I arrived in Panama City around 3 pm this afternoon, and took a taxi to the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI)'s headquarters in the Gorgas neighborhood of downtown Panama City. The temperature's about like it would be in D.C. on a hot day, but, much to our amazement, there...
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Dec 4 2009 - 3:27pm
About 100 million years ago, during the heyday of the dinosaurs, reefs were built by mollusks called rudist clams. Like modern clams, rudists were bivalves, with two shells (or valves) joined at a hinge. But they sure didn’t look like modern clams!
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Sep 12 2011 - 4:40pm
The evolution of whales represents one of the great stories in macroevolution. It's a narrative that has mostly benefitted from an extraordinary series of fossils recovered from rocks around the world, including challenging field areas in Egypt, Pakistan, and India.
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