By Sid PerkinsAug. 22,
2017 , 7:01 PM
You’d think a “toothed whale”
would have teeth. But scientists examining the 30-million-year-old partial
skulls of two dwarf dolphins found that not only were they missing their pearly
whites, but the snub-nosed cetaceans likely slurped up their prey from the
seafloor. The paleontologists who analyzed two partial skulls found in South
Carolina—one recently discovered by a diver and the other unearthed from the
same formation more than 30 years ago—put the long-extinct creature in a new
genus dubbed Inermorostrum, which roughly translated from Latin means
“defenseless snout.”
Larger-than-normal holes that once carried blood vessels
and nerves through the bones of the snout suggest the
dolphin had enlarged lips needed to feed via suction, the researchers
report today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The marine mammal
may even have had short, walrus-like whiskers to better sense prey while
grubbing through seafloor sediments, the researchers speculate.
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