Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of My Heart Radio. Hi, my name is Robert Lamb and this is the Monster Fact, a short form series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind, focusing in on mythical creatures, ideas, and monsters. In time, the Inuit people of the Bearing Sea tell tales of Aklut, a folkloric monster that takes the form of a giant orca while in the water, but can also venture out onto the ice flows, where it assumes the form of a giant wolf and hunts
the flesh of human beings. Whenever one encounters wolf prints that terminate at the edge of an ice flow, then one has found signs of the monster re entering the water to assume its orca form. The Oclut folk tale is exciting and enthralling on its own, but it also brings to mind the terrestrial ancestry of the orca or
killer whale. The leading hypothesis on whale evolution holds that the creatures evolved from four legged land dwellers that increasingly took to the sea beginning some fifty million years ago. While not wolves per se, these suspected whale ancestors are
sometimes described or illustrated as vaguely lupine in appearance. Orca are sometimes described as the wolves of the sea, but in scientists at the University of Copenhagen used genomic data to determine that while walrus is shared more in common with dogs and wolves, orcas had more in common with cows.
In prior research, mijard at All, writing for the journal Mammalian Biology, hypothesized that the orca's ancestors might have been something like a deer, perhaps similar to the modern water loving mouse deer, which may jump into the water and hide when threatened. Whatever the secrets of their origin, orcas now exist in two to five subspecies or races, which
differ from each other in diet and appearance. Andrew Foot at the University of Burne, Switzerland has argued that their genomic differences are, as with humans, partially driven by culture learned behaviors in ways of surviving that are passed down within a given group. Aklut stands apart from genomics and scientific scrutiny, but in some ways it nicely embodies the evolutionary connection between land and ocean. Tune in for additional
episodes of The Monster Fact each week. As always, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.