I’ve read that whales are occasionally seen in the wild with vestigial legs. Here’s one reference: http://www.livescience.com/animalworld/top10_vestigial_organs-9.html
I’ve failed to find any photos of this with both Google and Yahoo image searches. Anybody know where there’s a pic or two of this?
Well, part of out development involve gills so…
Didn’t gills end up as the innards of mammals ears?
I did find some articles with photographs, sadly not very clear ones, but they might help. Here you go :
http://www.edwardtbabinski.us/whales/rudiments01.html
http://www.edwardtbabinski.us/whales/rudiments02.html
http://www.edwardtbabinski.us/whales/rudiments03.html
http://www.edwardtbabinski.us/whales/rudiments04.html
http://www.edwardtbabinski.us/whales/rudiments05.html
Excelent find Pete,
Hi Pete,
I’m new. I was working on our site when I noticed the stats got flooded from your post. I’m familiar with the Straight Dope website, and visited pages in past, when seeking some “straight dope” on peculiar questions. 
On vestigial limbs.
The links that were given in your post, were from historical journals in response to Answers in Genesis / Jonathan Sarfati, and Creationists who claimed no hind limbs were ever discovered on whales.
There are better photos in existence. We contacted Professor Thewissen (paleontologist) specializing in early whales. He comments on the hind limbs found on a display at the Milwaukee Public Museum. These are vestigial Pelvis, he explains the problem:
“It shows that in Humpback whales there is a pelvic remnant, similar to the one in your whale, consisting of bone. Struthers also shows that Humpbacks have a remnant of the femur, however, it consists not of bone but instead of cartilage. This is why it was lost in the humpback that the museum mounted. So, the humpback had a femur remnant, but it is not present in the mount.”
-Thewissen
Photograph of modern pelvis in the Milwaukee Museum (two whale skeletons) and we have the photograph of Struthers’ 1881 Dissection of a Greenland Right Whale’s Pelvis and Femur
A very good site for photographs of vestigial organs, including humans: http://www.visual-evolution.com/
Thanks
You may also want to visit Prof. Thewissen’s “Digital Library of Dolphin Development” at:
http://www.neoucom.edu/DLDD/ which includes images of tiny limb buds on dolphin embryoes.
I forgot the URL with Thewissen’s commentary on Milwaukee Museum Whale Mount, that features the exhibit of Struther’s dissection. Here that is: http://www.edwardtbabinski.us/mpm/mpm_whale_limb.html
Hi Sharon, welcome to the Dope. I hope you stick around…
Thanks for the links Sharon and welocme to the board.
Jim
Thanks guys. I knew the “Straight Dope” website existed, but this, the message board is news to me. I was surprised this morning, I will definately link to it from our related search (I collect good blogs and specialized forums). Excellent resource for skepticism of pseudo-science.
“Whales got legs!”
“Now I have to kill him…”
Thanks all!
Boa constrictors and similar snakes have vestigial legs, too. I believe that picture is a python; I’ve seen longer ones on a live boa, but I can’t find any decent pictures.
Hi, Sharon, welcome aboard.
Thanks again for drawing my attention to this forum.
Speaking of vestigial features, one of my favorite examples with whales and snakes is the manatee / sea cow / dugong.
Unlike whales, which have virtually lost their limbs, the manatee is in the middle of transition between leg and flipper. Not all, but some retain toe nails identical to their elephant cousins, some have completely lost their toenails.
A list of Sirenians, with sketches are at: http://www.savethemanatee.org/sirenian.htm
For instance, West African Manatee has toenails but Amazonian Manatee does not.
Excerpts:
“The nearly complete skeleton of an ancient aquatic mammal with legs has been unearthed in Jamaica. The 50-million-year old skeleton is one of the best examples so far of the evolution from a land animal to an aquatic animal, said Daryl Domning, a paleontologist at Howard University in Washington, D.C., who reported the discovery.”
“The skeleton found in Seven Rivers, Jamaica, is a new genus and species of the order Sirenia, which encompasses the ancestors of modern-day manatees and dugongs. Commonly known as sea cows, sirenians are plant-eating mammals that spend their entire lives in water. They started out as land animals, however.”
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2001/10/1010_jamaicaseacow.html
Hans Thewissen’s team has been doing work on early Sirenian:
Manatee and Elephant Fossils
Seacows (including manatees and dugongs) and elephants are closely related, and their common ancestor lived more than 55 million years ago in Africa or South Asia. They are also related to the Desmostylia, an extinct group of hippo-like mammals that lived on the shores of the Pacific Ocean. Together, Sirenia (seacows), Proboscidea (elephants), and Desmostylia are referred to as tethytheres.
Ongoing research in the Thewissen Lab focuses on the origin and early divergence of the tethytheres. Fossils of anthracobunids are known from Pakistan and India. Fewer than 50 fossils of members of this family have ever been found, and they played a key role in the early evolution of the tethytheres. It is likely that anthracobunids were ancestral to later sirenians, proboscideans, and/or desmostylians.
http://darla.neoucom.edu/DEPTS/ANAT/Thewissen/
LeVar Burton and Sea Cows
LeVar Burton and Veterinarians comparing Sea Cow features with elephants, and give a closeup of the toenails (Click the “Preview This Video” link) for real media segment.
WELCOME sharon_457! I sincerely hope you elect to become a member. This may be the best intro post I’ve ever seen. We can certainly use a contributor like yourself. Again, welcome.
Great info by the way. Fascinating. Gotta wonder why an Intelligent Designer would put leg bones in a whale. 
Maybe the designer was dis-satisfied with design of the fish, because millions of years before, the fish grew legs and comes out of the water to make the mammal who eventually returns to the water and losing legs.
That’s where the “intelligence” comes in. Man’s got to eat.
Legs today, gone tomorrow and back again it’s a god’s prerogative to change their mind. Sounds like a female designer to me. 
“Then in 1997, certain features in Pachyrachis’ skull led scientists to put it at the root of the snake’s family tree as a sort of “missing link” between mosasaurs and true snakes that at some point took to the land. Rieppel and his colleagues now argue that traits found in Haasiophis and Pachyrachis are more akin to those of modern snakes, like the ability to unhinge their jaws to eat things larger than their heads. Such traits, the scientists say, mean that they are more closely related to modern snakes. So they “cannot be related to primitive mosasaurs,” Rieppel said. Rieppel believes the ancestors of modern snakes were burrowing lizards that lived on land, but he acknowledges that the West Bank fossils do not provide clear answers to the question. Worldwide there are about 2,700 different species of snakes, very few of which are marine animals. “And so we are back to not knowing what kind of an origin snakes had,” Rieppel said. Dr. Harry Greene, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Cornell University, said the most intriguing aspect about the West Bank fossils is they may show that certain “atavistic” traits can re-evolve if the right genes are triggered. The West Bank fossils may be snakes whose limbs re-evolved, making them “real snakes, just extinct real snakes” with legs, Greene said. Greene postulates that if animals like the West Bank fossils could re-evolve limbs, then other animals that have certain genes they never lost but whose “triggers” are dormant could re-evolve those traits. Maybe humans will end up with tails again.”
Sources for Quote
Superb cites! Best introduction ever, and considerably better than my own. Let’s not go there…
sharon_457, welcome aboard, and if you want to join the SDMB as a “charter member” I’d be happy to foot the bill. Email me if you’re interested.
Guests can’t email members. :smack:
*I’m good until March. *
Seen these?
Creation explained
http://home.neo.rr.com/johnbgood/creation_science.htm
Billy Wins First Creation Science Fair
http://www.creation-vs-evolution.us/babinski/creationism.gif
Scary stuff, eh?
http://www.algonet.se/~tourtel/hovind_seminar/part4b_images/Image180.jpg
Lots more fun stuff
http://images.google.com/images?svnum=10&hl=en&lr=&c2coff=1&q=creation+science
