Thank you so much!!!! Ancestral creatures are Gorgeous, Valid, Perfectly Reasonable things with legs.
In regards to the first comment, most things in the ocean perform gas exchange anyway so it isn’t that bold of a move - in some respects it’s kind of a fool’s move of terrestrial animals to leave the saline bath that life started off in, since we now have to lug our dumb bodies around, full of carefully balanced metaphorical-saltwater, because our cells are just Like That
regarding the second comment on this thread, dolphins are probably fine mostly as they are, and I would not expect them to “lose” attributes to demonstrate their “evolving/progressing away from their origins.“ People think that evolution is like an unstoppable escalator that either kills you or forcibly moves you from primitive things to sophisticated things, but it isn’t. Things don’t become More Thingish with Time, that’s not how evolution works.
There is no particular evolutionary pressure on dolphins to lose traits that suit their lifestyles perfectly well. Most of the high-pressure challenges that wild dolphins face today - fishing activities, pollution, habitat destruction, food network disruption and climate change - are not going to exert evolutionary pressure on remnant bones; and the act of breathing appears to be as natural to dolphins as, well, breathing.
For example, being able to breathe surface air means that dolphins and whales can move through water that has very low quantities of oxygen (such as highly polluted water) where fish cannot survive, because there is not enough oxygen diffused in the water to maintain a constant supply for fish; whales and dolphins can simply surface to take a gulp of air.
With enormous lungs that are adapted to holding breath for incredibly long periods of time, whales and dolphins can essentially scuba-dive to areas of the ocean that other animals cannot access, as well as eying up things above the surface of the water. In a rapidly changing environment, with food/climate/water all doing things they’ve NEVER done before, this offbeat mammalian funkiness may even be the key towards sticking around and surviving a weird period of history.
Anyway, these are Valid Historical Legges, and evolution is not a straight line from Bad Animals to Good Progressive Animals. As evidenced by how excellent and powerful these ancestral beasties are. They may be ancestral but they are MAGNIFICENT
pictured: a good girl, valid and perfect in herself, a stage of someone else’s evolution but also perfectly complete in herself, somebody’s daughter and somebody’s ancestor but also just somebody in her own right, perhaps not as good at swimming as the cetaceans of the future, but perfectly acceptable in her moment of history, and in all other moments
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