L'ancêtre des baleines

J'ai blogué il y a quatre ans en anglais sur le Mesonyx, l'ancêtre des cétacés. Quand j'ai vu il y a environ trente ans cette reproduction au Musée de l'histoire naturelle, j'avais été profondément impressionné. Un mammifère pas marin qui est l'arrière grand-père des baleines et des dauphins, ça m'a donné une idée de ce que signifiait l'évolution des espèces. Rien que de revoir cette photo, j'en suis encore tout émerveillé.

The Mesonyx

You can see on the picture on your right the Mesonyx, or rather a model of a mesonyx, which is a wolf-like mammal, of the Mesonychidae family, which are linked to... the whales and dolphins. They are their ancestors, which makes the now extinct mesonyx a distant relative of the sea creatures, a great uncle of some sort. I took this picture, of course, during my last trip to the Natural History Museum. It was a few minutes before closing time. I was really happy to find it: I had been obsessed with the mesonyx of the Natural History Museum since I was eleven, when I first saw it. I had forgotten its name, but not its look and not its affiliation with its sea dwelling grand-nephews.