photo credit: Julia Molnar/Smithsonian
Smithsonian paleobiologist Nick Pyenson and his team raced an incoming tide on the coast of Panama in 2011 to uncover a fossil of an ancient dolphin.
Pyenson thought they were uncovering an ancient shark-teeth species of dolphin. Wrong. His discovery yielded a brand new specimen.
“Once we got it back to D.C, and I got a close look at it, I could tell it was like nothing I’d ever seen before,” Pyenson told the Washington Post.
The fossil’s elongated snout and small eyes suggest a similarity to Amazon River dolphins, but Pyenson says the mammal lived in the open ocean. Named Isthminia panamensis, the newly discovered genus and species findings were published in the scientific journal PeerJ.
“We think it lived in the channel that connected the Atlantic and Pacific oceans before the isthmus of Panama formed,” Pyenson says.
According to the Post, the finding suggests that ancient dolphins living off the coast of South America made their way inland as ocean levels rose around 6 million years ago, Pyenson says. If we enter another period of rising oceans, this line of research may help scientists predict what will happen next.
“My hope is that by reviewing deep evolutionary evidence about river dolphins, we can guess what their, and maybe our, future will be,” Pyenson says.
video credit: Sadie Dingfelder/The Washington Post
source: The Washington Post