Marine mammals North Sea

Over the last decades our knowledge of the origin and evolution of marine mammals has increased vastly. Most of the key mysteries, such as place and time of origin of seals (Pinnipedia) and whales (Cetacea), have been documented and solved. During the same period spectacular technical developments in molecular science have resulted in more reliable phylogenetic models and refined hereditary lines of most marine mammal lineages. Some of these recent discoveries and findings concerning key fossils have been published in eminent journals such as Nature and Science, which has caused the unravelling of these mysteries to attract an ever growing audience (for a summary see Berta (2017)). In recent years textbooks with more or less complete sequences of marine mammal evolution have started to appear (Thewissen, 2014; Marx et al., 2016; Berta, 2017) - the first such sequences ever published.