Not all dolphins live in the salty ocean. While rare, some river dolphins live and eat in freshwater and are best known for their candy colored hues. Now, paleontologists have uncovered a fossilized skull belonging to a 16-million-year-old extinct river dolphin species in Peru named Pebanista yacuruna. It could grow to about 10 to 11 feet long and is the largest known species of river dolphin known to science. Pebanista is described in a study published March 20 in the journal Science Advances.
The name Pebanista yacuruna is inspired by the Yacuruna, a mythical aquatic people that legends say inhabit underwater cities in the Amazon basin and are similar to the god Neptune in Greek mythology. The fossilized skull was found in the Peruvian Amazon and belongs to the group Platanistoidea. This group was a common animal in the Earth’s ocean between 24 and 16 million years ago. The team believes that their primarily salt water dwelling ancestors invaded the prey-rich freshwater ecosystems of the early Amazon and learned to adapt to this new environment.
“Sixteen million years ago, the Peruvian Amazonia looked very different from what it is today,” Aldo Benites-Palomino, a study co-author and paleontologist at the University of Zurich in Switzerland, said in a statement. “Much of the Amazonian plain was covered by a large system of lakes and swamps called Pebas.”
[Related: Eavesdropping on pink river dolphins could help save them.]
This landscape stretched across present day Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru, and Brazil and included a variety of ecosystems in its lakes and swamps. About 10 million years ago, the Pebas system began to give way to the floodplain that Amazonia looks like today. Pebanista’s prey began to disappear as the landscape began to change, driving these giant dolphins to extinction. With Pebanista out of the picture, the relatives of today’s Amazon river dolphins called Inia had an opportunity to sneak…
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