#desmostylia

[kawanectes]

Smeshanni mir: neodesmostylia - group of recognizable-looking desmostylians: two species of neodesmostylus, boreal flatheadder, sinaloatherium, aleutodens

[252mya]

I Left My Heart In (third) set of pin buttons

In love with the Cenozoic Era? This set of pins is for you!Show your appreciation for any of the five first periods of the age of mammals.

252mya.com/left3

Art by David Orr

[harleycathartes]

When you’re desmoSTYLIN with the boys by the pool.

[typhlonectes]

Oddball hippo-sized marine mammal had a toothy vacuum mouth

The identification of a new species belonging to the marine mammal group Desmostylia has intensified the rare animal's brief mysterious journey through prehistoric time, finds a new study.

A big, hippo-sized animal with a long snout and tusks -- the new species, 23 million years old, has a unique tooth and jaw structure that indicates it was not only a vegetarian, but literally sucked vegetation from shorelines like a vacuum cleaner, said vertebrate paleontologist and study co-author Louis L. Jacobs, Southern Methodist University, Dallas.

But unlike other marine mammals alive today -- such as whales, seals and sea cows -- desmostylians went totally extinct. Desmostylians, every single species combined, lived in an interval between 33 million and 10 million years ago.

Their strange columnar teeth and odd style of eating don't occur in any other mammal, The new specimens -- from at least four individuals -- were recovered from Unalaska, an Aleutian island in the North Pacific...

[mullercells]

A new genus and species of desmostylian mammal that lived about 23 million years ago has been identified from fossils found on Unalaska Island.

The newly-discovered creature belongs to the order Desmostylia, a group of extinct marine mammals whose closest living relatives are elephants, sea cows and manatees.

Desmostylian mammals were large-bodied herbivores with enhanced adaptations for life in water and bulk aquatic feeding.

They lived around the margins of the North Pacific Ocean from the Oligocene until the end of the Miocene, 32.5 to 10.5 million years ago.

Unlike whales and seals, but like manatees, they were vegetarians. They rooted around coastlines, ripping up vegetation, such as marine algae, sea grass and other near-shore plants.

They probably swam like polar bears, using their strong front limbs to power along, and walked on land a bit, lumbering like a sloth.

The new desmostylian genus and species was named Ounalashkastylus tomidai by a team of paleontologists from Japan, Canada and the United States.

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[alphynix]

Neoparadoxia cecilialina, a desmostylian marine mammal from the late Miocene (~10 mya) of California. Known only from a juvenile specimen, adults may have grown up to 2.7m long (8′10″).

Desmostylians were originally interpreted as spending more time on land than at sea, but more recent studies have shown these animals to have been fully aquatic and incapable of supporting their own weight out of the water. They probably spent most of their time "walking" along the sea floor, sort of like marine equivalents of hippos, scooping up mouthfuls of aquatic vegetation with their backhoe-like jaws.

They were traditionally classified as relatives of sirenians and proboscideans, but this classification is geographically problematic -- while those groups originated in Africa, the desmostylians are known only from the Pacific Rim. A 2014 cladistic analysis instead placed them as being members of the odd-toed ungulates, much more closely related to horses, rhinos, and tapirs.