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The Pacific Northwest has some of the best fossil records of early pinnipeds ranging from 30 to 7 million years ago, and the Burke is home to many of these fossils. The oldest pinniped fossils are generally small, otter-sized seals known as Enaliarctos.
- Vertebrate Paleontology Collection Study Grant
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- Mammals
Location. 4303 Memorial Way NE Seattle, WA, United States....
- Fossils
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- Vertebrate Paleontology Collection Study Grant
Mar 22, 2018 · Researchers have determined that the fossilized remains of a prehistoric seal found in Grays Harbor County in Washington state belong to a new species which they’ve named Allodesmus demerei and estimate to be between 9–10.5 million years old.
- Overview
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Seals and sea-lions gracefully careen through today’s oceans with the help of legs that have become wide, flat flippers. But it was not always this way. Seals evolved from carnivorous ancestors that walked on land with sturdy legs; only later did these evolve into the flippers that the family is known for. Now, a beautifully new fossil called Puijila illustrates just what such early steps in seal evolution looked like. With four legs and a long tail, it must have resembled a large otter but it was, in fact, a walking seal.
Natalia Rybczynski unearthed the new animal at Devon Island, Canada and worked out that it must have swam through the waters of the Arctic circle around 20-24 million years ago. She named it Puijila darwini after an Inuit word referring to a young seal, and some obscure biologist. The skeleton has been beautifully preserved, with over 65% of the animal intact, including its limbs and most of its skull.
Puijila is a massive boon for biologists trying to understand the evolution of pinnipeds, the group that includes seals, sea lions and walruses. It’s not itself a direct ancestor, having branched off the evolutionary path that led to modern pinnipeds. It did, however, retain many of the same features that a direct ancestor would have had. “Puijila is a transitional fossil,” Rybczynski explains. “It gives us a glimpse of what the earliest stages of pinniped evolution looked like, before pinnipeds had flippers. And it suggests that in the land-to-sea transition, pinnipeds went through a freshwater phase.”
This familiar group evolved from land-dwelling carnivores and their closest living relatives are the bears and the mustelids (otters, weasels, skunks and badgers). For other marine mammals like whales and dolphins, the fossil record has given us dramatic visuals for the gradual transformation from land-dweller to full-time swimmer. But for pinnipeds, that transition is much murkier because until now, the earliest known seal Enaliarctos already had a full set of true flippers. Puijila changes all of that.
In the Origin of theSpecies, the ever-prescient Darwin wrote, “A strictly terrestrial animal, by occasionally hunting for food in shallow water, then in streams or lakes, might at last be converted into an animal so thoroughly aquatic as to brave the open ocean”. This year, on the 150th anniversary of the book’s publication, the walking seal that bears his name pays a fitting tribute to Darwin’s insight.
Puijila was just over a metre in length and had a long tail. Its four legs were short but strong, and would have been attached to its trunk by powerful muscles. The bones of its toes were somewhat flattened, which strongly suggests that they were webbed. In many ways, its skeleton was very similar to a modern otter’s but the shape of its skull and teeth mark it out as a seal.
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PS: I guarantee that someone, somewhere will get these details wrong, so two points are worth clarifying:
Mar 20, 2024 · A prehistoric seal that lived along an ancient shore where waves, scavengers and other processes break down a body was much less likely to be preserved in the fossil record than a marine mammal...
- Riley Black
Jan 21, 2003 · Archaeological evidence from prehistoric hunters in Washington and Alaska adds new fuel to the ongoing debate over the belief that humans have a propensity to over-exploit their natural resources, and also indicates that early Indians’ harvest of northern fur seals was sustainable.
The oldest definitive pinniped fossils date from approximately 30.6–23 million years ago (Ma) in the North Pacific. Pinniped monophyly is consistently supported; the group shares a common ancestry with arctoid carnivorans, either ursids or musteloids.
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By 1892, fewer than 100 elephant seals remained on Guadalupe Island off the coast of Baja California. By 1900, many species, including the northern elephant seal were believed exinct. In 1922, Mexico granted elephant seals protected status, and the United States soon followed.
