What Sounds Could the Ancestor of the Whale Hear? ZdS#5

The Youtube channel Zeste de science explores all aspects of scientific research, proving that even the most complicated scientific facts can be explained in less than 5 minutes, and that even the most seemingly trivial events of everyday life, if thoroughly studied, can contribute to the biggest technological advances.
Episode 5: The evolutionary history of cetaceans turns out to be more complicated than it first seemed. Whales are now sensitive to ultrasonic and infrasonic sounds, but that was not always the case. Palaeontologists from Montpelier have proven that the ancestor of the whale - the protocetid - had a very different hearing range. Observing a 45 million-year-old fossilised ear of one of them has shown that protocetids could not hear such sounds, but were able to hear both outside and inside the water, which is characteristic of amphibians.