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Updated: May 23, 2025
MARINE MAMMALS. The carnivorous mammals of the sea whales, seals, walruses, etc. seem to have been derived from some of the creodonts of the early Tertiary by adaptation to aquatic life. Whales evolved from some land ancestry at a very early date in the Tertiary; in the marine deposits of the Eocene are found the bones of the Zeuglodon, a whalelike creature seventy feet in length.
Their early Eocene ancestors, the Creodonts, gave rise in the Eocene to forms which we may regard as the forerunners of the cat-family and dog-family, to which most of our familiar Carnivores belong. Cyonodon has a wolf-like appearance, and Amphicyon rather suggests the fox. Primitive weasels, civets, and hyaenas appear also in the Eocene.
DOGS AND BEARS. The dog family diverged from the creodonts late in the Eocene, and divided into two branches, one of which evolved the wolves and the other the foxes.
Bears of the genus Ursus are of no great antiquity in a geological sense, for we have no knowledge of them earlier than the Pliocene of Europe, and even later in America, but fossils becoming gradually less bear-like and approximating toward the early type from which dogs also probably sprung, go back to the early Tertiary creodonts.
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