Photos of atavistic legs on whales?

I have read numerous reports of whales captured that have visible legs. Does anyone know of photographic records of these whales? The whale embryo exhibits leg buds that eventually disappear, but very rarely these legs develop fully.

This is probably along the line of what you're interested - There is an article in Nov National Geographic Magazine about evolution of whale.

also http://www.sciam.com/explorations/2001/092401whales/

I am not aware of any photos nor, indeed, of 'numerous reports' of whale legs. But if the information you seek is out there, they will know about it in another news group called talk.origins.

I think these fall into the same category as buffalo wings.

John M.

Yes, have you bothered to read something say from an expert (as opposed to newsgroups)

I looked but cannot find any credible report of fully developed hindlimbs in any extant whale. There are some reports of rudimentary limb bones in living whales, but these would be far from fully developed hindlimbs. Snakes such as pythons have true hindlimb buds but these buds cannot develop into fully functional hindlimbs either, even if the embryos are manipulated in the laboratory. Snakes have apparently lost part of the developmental program for fully functional hindlimbs. The same is probably true of whales, which have probably irreversibly lost their hindlimbs. Nevertheless this hypothesis is not as easy to ascertain in whales as someone has pointed out that it is difficult to perform observations and/or experiments on the whale embryos, given the fact that they develop to full term inside large, active, aquatic mammals.

Further reading:
http://www.users.qwest.