Dear Creatards: Suck On It

[Minimalist]

http://www.heritagedaily.com/2016/06/the...sea/111821

The call of the sea: Mammalian evolutionary transitions back to the sea

Though mammals adapted on land, a new study by Maria Chikina and Nathan Clark has shown that during three major independent evolutionary events, a number of mammals harkened back to the sea.

For the manatee, walrus, dolphin, and killer whale, the return to the sea involved many evolutionary trade-offs amongst hundreds of genes: a general loss of the number of sensory genes for smell and taste, new functions for genes forming skin and connective tissue, and genes involved in muscle structure and metabolism.