Whales

    Nobody knows the origin of whales, although it is presumed Their ancestors were some kind of primitive hoofed mammals which moved from the land to the sea, and that during this period there 'must have been' an amphibious stage. That they are mammals is beyond doubt, for they are warm blooded, air breathing, give birth to their young alive, and suckle each one with up to one and a half tons of milk a day. 

The first creatures classified as whales, Archaeoceti, are found in the fossil record roaming the high seas only five million years after the most famous crisis in the history of Earth, the extinction of dinosaurs around sixty-five million years ago. Modern whales arrived about five million years after that. 

The problem for Darwinians is in trying to find an explanation for the immense number of adaptions and mutations needed to change a small and primitive earthbound mammal, living alongside and dominated by dinosaurs, into a huge animal with a body uniquely shaped so as to be able to swim deep in the oceans, a vast environment previously unknown to mammals. 

Notable complexities in whale evolution concern the eye, subtly changed so that light rays through the sea water are brought to focus on the retina; the skin, which has a curious outer surface helping to streamline the flow of water; the replacement of sweat glands by a thick layer of blubber fat to control the body temperature; the superb hearing system; the way in which a female whale suckles her young under water without them drowning; and the plates of baleen which hang like curtains, instead of teeth,  from  the  roof of the  mouth  of whalebone whales, acting as perfectly designed sieves for the tiny crustaceans which form their food (panel 13). All this has to evolve in at most five to ten million years - about the same time as the relatively trivial evolution of the first upright walking apes into ourselves.