#whippomorpha

[have-you-seen-this-animal]

Amazon river dolphin?

Have you seen the boto (Inia geoffrensis)?

I have now

Yes, in photos/videos

Yes, irl

I'm not sure

Voting ended onJul 12, 2025

[taxonomytournament]

Taxonomy Tournament: Mammals

Ruminantia. This suborder of even-toed ungulates gets nutrients from plant material by fermenting it in a specialised stomach. It includes cattle, yak, deer, sheep, goats, giraffes, and antelopes.

Whippomorpha. This suborder of even-toed ungulates have for the most part lost their toes, becoming dolphins and whales. It also includes hippos.

Which clade of animals is better?

Ruminantia

Whippomorpha

Show results

Voting ended onFeb 16, 2024

[markscherz]

You said earlier that all whales are evolved from a hooved ancestor. Is there any remaining hoovery in modern day whales? Which is to say, do today's whales have any remnants of hooves?

Well, baleen whales are a lot like giant hoovers, vacuuming up vast quantities of krill, but I know that that is not what you meant by 'hoovery'.

No, there are no remnants of hoofs in whales, unlike the fingernails of manatees. The hallmarks of their artiodactyl affinities lie among other features. Important to note that although the group is named after their digits, there are a host of other features that unite them.

[alphynix]

Modern beluga whales and narwhals are the only living representatives of the monodontid lineage, found only in cold Arctic and sub-Arctic waters. But this whale family actually first evolved in much warmer climates – and some of them were downright tropical.

Casatia thermophila lived about 5 million years ago during the early Pliocene, in the Mediterranean Sea around Tuscany, Italy. Although known only from a couple of partial skulls and a few vertebrae it was probably similar in size to its modern relatives, around 5m long (16'4").

It seems to have had a larger number of functional teeth than modern monodontids, and probably didn't suction feed like its modern close relatives. Instead it may have fed more like most porpoises and dolphins, relying more on speed and snapping jaws to capture prey.

It inhabited the Mediterranean at a time not long after the sea there had mostly dried up and then been rapidly refilled. The presence of warm-water marine species such as bull sharks, tiger sharks, and dugongs in the same fossil beds as Casatia indicates the local climate at the time was hotter than it is today, with tropical temperatures – and suggests that this whale's ancestors must have originally moved into the replenishing Mediterranean from lower latitudes alongside these other warmth-adapted animals.

This tropical monodontid was also much closer related to modern belugas than modern narwhals are, which raises the possibility that the two living monodontid species actually specialized for colder conditions completely independently of each other rather than descending from a cold-adapted common ancestor. Instead modern belugas and narwhals may have originated from separate warm-water monodontid ancestors who evolved similar cold-tolerant adaptations in parallel as the climate cooled during the onset of the Quaternary ice age, while the rest of their relatives all went extinct.

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Nix Illustration | Tumblr | Twitter | Patreon

[animalids]

Amazon river dolphin (Inia geoffrensis)

Photo by Amos Nachoum

[iamthekaijuking]

apparently cetaceans are even-toed ungulates

which means that a deer is more closely related to a blue whale than it is to a horse. taxonomy is wack

Yup! Even toed ungulates bear their weight on an even number of toes and digest cellulose in multiple stomach chambers (with the exception of pigs and cetaceans), which contrasts with odd toed ones which bear weight on an odd number of toes and digest cellulose in their intestines. They’re also usually better at extracting minerals from their food, hence why way more of them have horns than their odd toed contemporaries.

Whales, hippos, entelodonts, and Andrewsarchus are all members of Whippomorpha, which was a weird family of evidently ill tempered ungulates that were usually omnivores. They absolutely had no problem getting meat though, and the ancestors of whales were small almost dog-like Whippomorphs that took advantage of the fact that there’s often food in water sources, and then took advantage of the fact that if you sit in said water source then food will come to you. They eventually went out into the open ocean and the rest is history.

Hippos are actually the odd ones out in the family because they’re entirely incapable of eating meat, and even when they do eat an animal it’s usually due to dietary or environmental stress and not to round out their diet like other herbivores.

And I guess cetaceans are a little weird for the family (aside from being marine) because they’re usually not as aggressive. Don’t go testing if this is true though.

Anyways Whippomorpha is my favorite ungulate family

[economicsresearch]

page 497 - whales were fish who crawled on land until they were mammals then crawled back into the ocean. Whales used to exist in greater numbers than they do today. Whaling declined as the need for whale oil declined with the advent of petroleum and vegetable based lubricants and eating the meat fell out of favour in many countries. The only way to stop anything’s destruction is to remove its value as commodity.

[mothmammoth]

i saw something earlier and i was going to make a shitpost about whale evolution... but i completely forgot what i was going to say because i found THIS while checking on some details:

‘Whippomorpha is a mixture of English (wh[ale] + hippo[potamus]) and Greek (μορφή, morphē = form). Attempts have been made to rename the clade Cetancodonta but Whippomorpha maintains precedence.’

and i’m absolutely losing it