At https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/whale-valley-the-whale-graveyard-in-the-sahara-desert-that-shows-they-once-had-feet-and-toes … Wadi Al-Hitan, or Whale Valley as it is otherwise known, is situated in the western desert of Egypt. We are told it was once covered in sea water – an extension of the Tethys Sea, in the ancient past. One could argue contrary to this idea as it could equally be the resullt of a huge tidal wave that swamped part of what is now the Sahara desert. Mainstream would dispute that as it involves the idea of catastrophic events that do not bed well with uniformitarian geology. However, what exacly is this whale graveyard? Over 400 whales have so far been found, or are estimated to be in the formation. These seem to represent a primitive form of the animal that now inhabits the modern world. The oddity is that some of them appear to have feet and toes, appendages that are interpreted as part of the evolutonary process of a land animal evolving into an ocean mammal. Obviousy, this is not a subject to be dealt with glibly and would take a reasonable amount of research in order to find exactly what these appendages look like. There is no reason a land animal could have found it more productive to vacate the land and move to the sea in order to seek out food resources. It is not intrinsically against the idea of catastrophism – and can be accommodated within that kind of thinking. It is of course contrary to Creationist thinking, both Christian and Islamic, or various other kinds of religious mantra. However, what is clear is that these fossils have been used to create an evolutionary story that has proved popular and is regularly quoted without critical thinking being applied.
Whales in the modern world are ocean going animals – and are usually big. There are of course small whales and variations in size suggesting an adaptable animal that has filled various niches in the ocean environment. What else might those appendages have been useful for? One factor usually passed over is that not only whales exist in the formation, dating to the end of the Eocene, around 40 million years ago. There are the mixed remains of sea turtles, bony fishes, sharks, rays, – and ocean going crocodiles, sea cows and shell fish. A veritable mixture of marine fauna one would think could have been deposited by a great wave on what is now North Africa.