A Whale of a Tale

This afternoon is the last day of my holiday and tomorrow I head back into the salt mines so I’m really working hard at relaxing now.
I was reading the following in the Reader’s Digest Book of Facts and suddenly I found myself on a book buying expedition.
The idea of an Evolutionary U-Turn grabbed me by the throat, read this ~
"The ancestors of whales were once land animals. Scientific examination of whale skeletons indicates that they have a vestigial pelvis or hipbone, proving that whales once possessed legs. The ancestors of whales, like the ancestors of all animals, came originally from the sea. But whales began returning to the sea about 70 million years ago, steadily losing the physical characteristics of land mammals.
Their front legs changed into flippers, their rear legs disappeared, their bodies acquired a thick insulating layer of blubber and their nostrils moved from the snout to the top of the head to become a blowhole.
It is not known why whales returned to the sea, but it may have been because food was more plentiful there or because enemies were fewer.
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So what, you might say?
I didn’t say that, I put my imagination to work. But I felt suddenly blind as if I were stumbling around in the dark. The pictures wouldn’t come.
I didn’t have a problem with the idea of creatures evolving, that is old stuff for me and I do believe that the trend of lifekind is to change, to evolve.
It was just hard for me to think about a creature sustaining a painstaking biological change to adapt to living on the land only to revert back at some point to becoming, once again, a sea dweller.
And it’s not why where the problem lay, and it may not even be how - because I’m really quite used to not knowing anything about a lot of "stuff".
I think it boils down to an assumption I made based on a prejudice I have. That having lungs is a sign of greater sophistication and complexity; so a surer sign of intelligence and superiority than having gills.
Hell bells, I thought. I’m something that there’s not a word for, yet.
I’m a sea creature-ist!
For years I’ve clearly seen in my mind’s eye, a one way lineal march of creatures moving from the sea and progressing to live on the land, I perceived that, from there, a "natural" extension would be for any terrestial life-form worth its salt to find the means to move from the land and travel into space - and the final frontier – not necessarily humans – I’m not an animal-ist.
I just didn’t expect that any creature would turn tail, and retreat back into the sea!
And yet the crazy thing about that vision is, a land creature is no better adapted to living in space than a sea creature would be. I think we can probably learn every bit as much from whales as they can learn from us.
Anyway to soothe my troubled mind, I went on the net, the biggest playground cum market-place ever.
I found, "At the Water's Edge, Fish with Fingers, Whales with Legs, and How Life Came Ashore but Then Went Back to Sea".
Yes, I thought, I would like to know about the "…engines of macroevolution .." and "… the transformation of body shapes across millions of years."
So I have now bought the book and I’ll blog you about it .. later.