Why do most marine mammals have horizontal tails, while other marine life tend to have vertical tails?
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The tails in these animals developed completely independently of each other. In the case of fish the tail developed from the tail. And they therefore ended up with this vertical tail. You can see some of the similar features in alligators even though this is a separate development of a swimming tail again. Mammals on the other hand have a tail which have developed from their hind legs. First as webbing between the toes like most aquatic animals but then this webbing grew together and bigger to form the tail you see today. Because of this it ended up horizontal. This advantage of this is that they use the same bone structures as all mammals feet so it is a much shorter development path. However the vertical tail of fishes means they can use muscles along the entire body to swim instead of shorter muscles connected to the rear body as mammals do.
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