Would you be able to compare a huge whale to a raccoon-sized land creature? Would there be any similarity between these two living creatures, excepting the fact that they are both mammals?

Well, it seems that there was a much closer connection between today’s whales and this raccoon-sized strange land creature that lived in India about 50 million years ago and is now known as Indohyus. According to a new study, it seems that this Indohyus tiny deer-like mammal represents the missing evolutionary link to modern whales.

Although scientist have known for a long time that whales had ancestors that walked on land, they previously proposed the hippo as the closest land relative of today’s huge water mammals. But a team of researchers led by Hans Thewissen of Northeastern Ohio Universities Colleges of Medicine and Pharmacy did not agreed with this old theory and started to piece together a series of intermediate fossils that trace the whales’ evolutionary journey from land to sea. Surprisingly or not, after they had studied the structure and composition of hundreds of fossils of the Indian four-footed deer-like creature known as Indohyus, the scientists agreed that this tiny animal was today’s whales’ land ancestor. Indohyus was part of a larger group of mammals know as raoellids, which lived about the same time as the earliest whales, that is about 50 million years ago.

Scientists discovered a range of similarities between Indohyus and cetaceans’ skulls, ears and teeth. It seems that the tiny deer-like animal spent a lot of time in the water, until it became an aquatic creature, or the modern day whales’ ancestor.

"Cetaceans originated from an Indohyus-like ancestor and switched to a diet of aquatic prey," researchers wrote.

So, as strange is this may sound, today’s huge water mammals might have evolved from a tiny deer-like land creature. Once again, the laws of evolution prove to be amazing!