Uniformity within Diversity

While the animal clade is vast and divergent, sometimes you just have to look a little deeper to see the commonalities. Though humans, whales, and snakes look very different and live in very different places, when you look inside they all share skeletal elements. 

Take a look at the tail bones of these three groups; while whale tails and snake tails do very different jobs, the underlying bones are the same. Even humans have tail bones as a part of their inner anatomy - what a tale!

 

 

 

 

Lend me Your Ears

Snakes don't chew their food; they swallow it whole, so they have evolved to have more flexibility in their jaws in order to consume larger prey animals. Since humans readily chew their food and need far less jaw mobility, a bone found in snakes' jaws has been repurposed to our inner ears to give us better hearing on land. Whales use their entire, fatty jaw bones to interpret sounds from the water and their inner ears are structured differently than all land mammals.