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featured book review: July 2002 "How Whales Walked into the Sea" by Faith McNulty, illustrated by Ted Rand for Ages 6-10 (from Scholastic Press, 1999) The terms "evolution" and "natural selection" are often used interchangeably, which confuses an already complex subject. Both ideas are challenging to understand, but in different ways, on different scales. This month's featured essay ("Kids' Gateway to Understanding Natural Selection") offers the peppered moth as a brilliant example of natural selection operating in a brief timeframe. "How Whales Walked Into the Sea," by Faith McNulty tackles the tougher challenge of explaining evolution itself --- in kid terms, no less --- by tracing the ancestry of a single modern animal, the whale, as it evolved from a wolflike land mammal over the course of twenty million years. Such a book would have been mostly conjectural just twenty years ago; the fossil intermediaries that filled in the blanks in whale evolution are brand-spanking new discoveries, mostly made in the 1990s in Pakistan and Northern Africa. This book, then, has the distinction of being a children's science book that's well ahead of many high school and college textbooks. McNulty begins by noting that modern whales have always been a curiosity: warm-blooded, live-bearing, air-breathing creatures living in the sea. It's the ultimate fish-out-of-water story --- or nonfish-IN-water story, I suppose. Each two-page spread takes a single, easy-to-follow evolutionary step, providing hypotheses for how natural selection may have spurred the development of each new form. Looking to supplement depleted resources on land, Mesonychid chases fish into ever-deeper water; those with broader feet swim further and deeper, securing a selective advantage that leads to offspring with ever-broader extremities. Mesonychid eventually evolves far enough to speciate to Ambulocetus, "the walking whale," an animal more suited to water than land, then to Rodhocetus, "the hardly-walking whale," whose limbs are almost entirely flipperlike. The next fossil form, Dorudon, still has tiny vestigial hind legs, though they are utterly useless and destined to disappear with time. And perhaps most captivating of all in this clear sequence are the vestigial structures of the modern whale --- still possessed of tiny leg bones, though now completely internal, and of a complete wrist/hand/finger skeleton within the front flippers. The lexicon may seem too hard for kids --- if you don't know kids. I have seen an entire preschool classroom of four-year olds gleefully spitting out "Diplodocus! Euocephalus! Archaeopteryx!" as the teacher's pointer moved from one creature to another on a wall poster. For reasons I've yet to fathom, kids just lap up these massive Latin monikers without a hiccup. McNulty takes full advantage of this ability and of their magnetic attraction to prehistoric life, using accurate terms and underlining such critical elements as time scale and the logic of natural selection. The result is a book that is likely to send parents' voices trailing off in wonder as they are reminded just how lovely and compelling the evolutionary process is. N.B. EnchantedLearning.com (this month's Editor's Choice website) has the following subsection on whales, including Ambulocetus and other precursors of the modern whale: http://www.enchantedlearning.com/subjects/whales/glossary/ |
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