article_snippet: A whale that swam hundreds of miles up an African river after taking a wrong turn 17 million years ago is helping shed light on a key moment in human evolution.
article_snippet: Palaeontologists discovered the fossilised remains of the ancient ancestor to modern beaked whales in the middle of one of the harshest desert areas of Turkana, Kenya.
article_snippet: This 17 million-year-old fossil shown in the photograph above is from a whale found far inland in Kenya and has shed light on when East Africa's tectonic uplift that drastically altered the climate in the area first began .
article_snippet: our ape-like ancestors say that for a whale found far inland in Kenya to have travelled so far inland in a river the area must have been much wetter, far flatter and dominated by forests.
article_snippet: Professor Louis Jacobs, a vertebrate palaeontologist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas who led the study, said: 'The whale was stranded up river at a time when east Africa was at sea level and was covered with forest and jungle. '
article_snippet: The whale fossil was first discovered in Loperot, west Turkana, Kenya in 1964 by palaeontologist James Mead, a curator at the Smithsonian Instution at the time.
article_snippet: For The whale fossil to have ended up there, the landscape at the time  must have looked very different.
article_snippet: The fossil of the whale's beak (above), was found in 1964, and is thought to belong to an extinct species that became stranded in an ancient river after taking a wrong turn while swimming down the coast of east Africa .
article_snippet: The fossil of the whale's beak (above) was found in an area of desert at Loperot in west Turkana, in Kenya, on the site of an ancient river .
article_snippet: However, The fossil of the whale's beak (above) disappeared in 1979 and was only rediscovered in 2011 at Harvard University after Professor Jacobs asked curators to search for The fossil of the whale's beak (above).
article_snippet: Professor Jacobs and his colleagues, whose work is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, have now re-examined the specimen and claim the whale has provided a definitive date for when the geological changes in east Africa began.
article_snippet: Determining ancient land elevation is notoriously difficult, but the whale has provided new clues.
article_snippet: The area of Turkana in Kenya where The fossil of the whale's beak (above) was found (above) is now a desert, but was a forest 17 million years ago when the whale is thought to have taken a wrong turn and swam hundreds of miles up the ancient Anza River .
article_snippet: Professor Professor Jacobs and Professor Jacobs colleagues believe the whale may have been migrating along the east African coast and mistakenly entered the mouth of the ancient Anza River.
article_snippet: James Mead shown above excavating the whale fossil in the 'Open Pit Turtle Mine' in Loperot, Kenya, in 1964 .
highlights_snippet: Fossil of beaked whale was discovered in desert of west Turkana in Kenya .
  