Synapsid Taxonomy is the Worst

Crowned Lemurs (Eulemur coronatus), males, Lemuridae, far northern Madgascar

ENDANGERED.

there have been several instances of young baleen whales running afoul of something and being captured for rehabilitation, yes! they were mostly gray whales.

which makes sense, gray whales are slow enough to get caught in the first place and hardy enough to not immediately stress themselves to death over being poked and put in a tank (as long as hundreds of pounds of delicious shellfish are on offer, anyway)

none of them were ever kept very long, they were rehabilitated to a healthy weight and then released. (healthy weight for a juvenile gray whale is almost 20,000 lbs. BIG baby)

Kalakocetus aurorae was an early cetacean that lived during the Eocene, about 50-48 million years ago, in what is now the northwestern region of the Indian subcontinent.

It represents the (currently) most basal known branch of the whale lineage, with teeth that are transitional between the crushing herbivorous-omnivorous molars of the closely-related raoellids and the shearing carnivorous molars of later archaeocetes.

Only known from a lower jaw and teeth, its full life appearance is unknown — but based on the body proportions of other early cetaceans it would have been a roughly cat-sized animal, around 60cm long (~2'), possibly resembling a smaller version of its better-known relative Pakicetus. It was also probably similarly semiaquatic, wading into rivers to hunt fish and other small freshwater prey.

———

NixIllustration.com | Tumblr | Patreon

Choerosaurus dejageri, the permian therocephalian with a funny face.

yes with an exception: when kangaroos are on land, they use their legs together for hopping, but when they swim, they alternate which leg is kicking just like humans and dogs do!

so they CAN, they just don't unless they think they need to.

They were so differently proportioned, and some species grew so large, than hopping like a modern kangaroo was probably physically impossible for them, so researchers have proposed that they walked bipedally instead!

There are multiple delightfully cursed reconstructions of this behaviour which makes them look more like a person running around pretending to be a dinosaur than anything else

Pronghorn Antilocapra americana

Both evolved from this thing, which is currently not living