Evolution
The earliest fossil phocids date from the mid-Miocene, 15 million years ago in the north Atlantic. Until recently, many researchers believed phocids evolved separately from otariids and odobenids from otter-like animals, such as Potamotherium, which inhabited European freshwater lakes. Recent evidence strongly suggests a monophyletic origin for all pinnipeds from a single ancestor, possibly Enaliarctos, most closely related to the bears.
Monk seals and elephant seals are believed to have first entered the Pacific through the open straits between North and South America, which closed only in the Pliocene. The various Antarctic species may have either used the same route, or traveled down the west coast of Africa.
Read more about this topic: Earless Seal
Famous quotes containing the word evolution:
“Historians will have to face the fact that natural selection determined the evolution of cultures in the same manner as it did that of species.”
—Konrad Lorenz (1903–1989)
“The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“Analyze theory-building how we will, we all must start in the middle. Our conceptual firsts are middle-sized, middle-distanced objects, and our introduction to them and to everything comes midway in the cultural evolution of the race.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)