Natural History Museum

By comparing body lengths from both living and fossil species – an approach rarely taken – the research revealed that the evolutionary trends in cetacean size ...

With a vision of a future in which both people and the planet thrive, it is uniquely positioned to be a powerful champion for balancing humanity’s needs with those of the natural world. It is custodian of one of the world’s most important scientific collections comprising over 80 million specimens accessed by researchers from all over the world both in person and via over 50 billion digital data downloads to date. We welcome millions of visitors through our doors each year, our website has had 17 million visits in the last year and our touring exhibitions have been seen by around 20 million people in the last 10 years. It’s been suggested recently that this may allow the species to target smaller and more manoeuvrable patches of krill at night, when other whales aren't as active. The researchers observed the changes by visualising them as adaptive landscapes, where evolution is seen as a series of peaks and troughs. The most extreme size adaptations, however, only take place in individual branches of the cetacean family much closer to the present. Over time, they hope to see how these groups changed, and how competition between them could have affected their mutual evolution. This is an interesting finding that shows the limitations of excluding extinct species from studies of evolutionary trends.' For example, small species lose heat rapidly underwater, so getting large can help to maintain body temperature.' Over time, their descendants became increasingly adapted to life in water, before leaving land behind altogether. Instead, they found that the adaptive landscape was mostly flat, with few peaks. However, a new study reveals this diversity came much later in their evolution than expected.