A Fools Experiment

"Mid-explaining mode" In the above picture, I'm posing with the  single largest tooth ever discovered in Australia.   At around 5.2 million years of age, this Physeteroid was a huge macro-predatory whale that  fed upon the flesh of small to mid-sized baleen whales.  With a skull 3 metres in length (the size of a small car), it dominated oceans worldwide for millions of years, engorging itself on its gigantic prey.  Im making a documentary about these enigmatic predators. Here's a sneak peek: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aZTGs9XrIc We once thought the "great white whale" of Moby Dick fame was only part of fiction. But now, thanks to the discovery of this gigantic tooth and other remains found worldwide, we know that is not the case...   Imagine 40 of these teeth, the size of 1.25 litre coke bottles suspended in the jaws of a mega-predator Moby Dick was real... and it bathed in the blood of other whales, millions of years ...

Travel back some 50 million years on planet earth. You find yourself in the Indo-Pakistan region of the relatively newly formed Himalayan mountain belt. Life has adjusted from one extreme to the other; the non-avian dinosaurs are distant memories preserved within stone and the earth is getting hotter. But teetering on the edge of a freshwater environment, the ancestor of all modern whales was taking its first tentative steps back into the water. You look around. Dense shrubbery gives way to a riverbank and resting on the edge of the slow moving water is an animal the size of a Labrador. It has four legs, an elongated snout with sharp teeth. It looks like a mix between an otter and a seal. This is Pakicetus . The Walking whale of Indo-Pakistan: the ancestor of all modern whales. Can’t you see the family resemblance between this animal and a Blue whale? Wait, seriously?! (Image by Roman Uchytel) You might exclaim… “A whale with four legs? What a loa...