A toothy , hippo - sized mammalian who ate like a vacuum cleaner mosey North Pacific shorelines about 23 million eld ago . CalledOunalashkastylus tomidai , the new genus and mintage belong to the order Desmostylia , the only ordering of marine mammals to ever go altogether nonextant . The findings were published this month inHistorical Biology .
The fossils , which come from at least four somebody , were recovered from an Aleutian island call up Unalaska . The animal had a farseeing snout with tusks , and their tooth and jaw structure show that they were vegetarian that rip out marine algae , ocean grass , and other close - shore works – and then literally imbibe them up into their mouths . “ The new brute – when compared to one of a different specie from Japan – made us realize that desmos do not chew like any other animal,”Southern Methodist University ’s Louis Jacobssays in astatement . “ They clinch their tooth , root up plant and suck them in . ”
They would buttress their low-pitched jaw with their columnar tooth against their upper jaw , while handsome muscles in the neck power the ivory and cock-a-hoop muscles in the throat helped with sucking . “ No other mammal eats like that,”Jacobs lend . “ The enamel rings on the tooth show wear and culture , but they do n’t disclose consistent pattern related to habitual manduction motions . ”
The thickset - limbed creature probably drown in a similar way to polar bears with their sinewy forelimbs . And on land , they probably lumbered along like sloths . “ Ounalashka , ” means “ near the peninsula ” in the Aleut spoken language , and “ stylus ” is Latin for “ editorial , ” referring to the shape of the cusps of their teeth . The species name honors a Nipponese vertebrate paleontologist . Also , a group of desmostylians is telephone a round , a appellative that reward artist Ray Troll .
Unalaska is the furthest north any desmo has ever been found . The group is only known from the North Pacific : from Baja California , up along the west glide of North America , around the Alaska Peninsula and the Aleutian Islands , and over to Russia ’s Kamchatka Peninsula and Sakhalin Island and the Nipponese isles .
One of the fossil of this fresh desmo belonged to a babe . “ The baby tells us they had a procreation population up there,”Jacobs explains . “ They must have stayed in sheltered orbit to protect the young from breaker and stream . ” Adults were big enough to be safe from predators . Study Colorado - authorAnthony Fiorillo from the Perot Museum of Nature and Scienceadds : “ The baby also distinguish us that this area along the Alaska coast was biologically productive enough to make it a dear place for raising a mob . ”
However , unlike all other marine mammal orders , this one kick the bucket whole extinct . Every unmarried desmostylian live and died between 33 million and 10 million old age ago . While short - live , they were a successful group with greater biodiversity than we antecedently thought .
Image Credit : Ray Troll
