Hey, you gotta hand it to those dolphins. They just wanted it more.

If whales were just a little more butch, maybe so many of them wouldn't be endangered. Here's some encouraging news from the dark past: "Savage ancient whale was 'marine T-rex,' researchers say."

More surprising still, this sharp-toothed, big-eyed, sonar-lacking, submersible ass-kicker was an ancestor of that gentle giant of the deep, the baleen whale. A 25-million-year-old janjucetus hunderi skull fossil discovered in the late 1990s by an Australian surfer sheds new light on the evolution of the deep-thinking sulphur bottom that eats plankton through bristles.

The janjucetus hunderi is just one of a treasure trove of fossils discovered Down Under in recent years, all of them weird enough to support my theory that Australia, not Pluto, should be considered another planet. There's a "devil wallaby"; a flesh-eating, sabre-toothed kangaroo; an 882-pound "demon duck of doom"; and a marsupial lion with an opposable thumb and retractable claw that one scientist, determined to torture his Jurassic Park metaphors, calls "the velociraptor of the mammal world." Of course, these are all mentioned in the Book of Genesis; you just have to find a good translation.

Ishmael gives a solid tutorial in cetology.

The whales may need some ultimate fighting skills: It turns out they probably ain't all that smart.

Could we send Kirk and the gang back to rescue a couple t-rex whales to talk with the aliens?

And what's Michael Crichton got against theme parks anyway?