Jonathan
Amos Science correspondent
25 June 2017
It's a curious thing to see a group of early whale foetuses up
close - to see beings so small that have the potential to become so big.
But what really strikes you, especially in those initial
developmental stages, is how familiar the forms look. How like an early human
foetus, they appear.
"This is something you see time and time again in
vertebrates, not just with mammals," says Richard Sabin, the Natural
History Museum's top whale expert.
"You see these similarities in the early developmental
stages and it's really not until you're halfway through the gestation - which
for a humpback whale is around 11 months - that you start to see the things
that make that foetus characteristically the species that it is."
Richard has a remarkable sequence of seven humpback foetuses
that he's going to put on display for the NHM's major
summer exhibition on cetaceans.
They go from what is essentially just a ball of cells that's
perhaps only a few weeks old, all the way through to a specimen that appears to
be a perfect humpback in miniature.
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