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Blog post: The terrible fossil record of sea otters
Boesse posted a topic in General Fossil Discussion
Hi all - in the hopes of attempting to reach a wider audience, and anyone who has collected possible sea otter fossils, I'm sharing the first two posts from my blog "The Coastal Paleontologist" in a short series on sea otter paleontology and evolution. The first one is mostly a bit on sea otter biology, and the second is the first one that really deals with the paleontology aspect. The third (and fourth?) posts will deal with what the limited fossil record can tell us about sea otter evolution. The sea otter fossil record is quite poor, and I'm hoping that some of you may have found some fossil specimens and might consider making them available for scientific study. Anyway, here's part 1: https://coastalpaleo.blogspot.com/2020/05/the-terrible-fossil-record-of-sea.html And part 2: http://coastalpaleo.blogspot.com/2020/06/the-terrible-fossil-record-of-sea.html Part 3: will update as soon as I get it finished! And a teaser - the left mandible of the holotype specimen of Enhydra macrodonta from the Crannell Junction locality right off of Highway 101 near Arcata, California. I spent about 3 years emailing various curators about this fossil, if they had it on loan, and I finally got a response from Dr. William Miller III at Humboldt State University in Arcata that he didn't remember such a specimen existing there. The paleontologist who named it, Dr. Frank Kilmer, who was retired, mailed me a letter indicating that the mandibles had been given back to the private collector (!!!) after the species was published - but nobody at HSU knew their name! One former student did, but would not return my phone calls. I visited HSU in 2008 when I was an undergraduate student and rifled through their teaching collection and found A mandible, but I didn't think it was THE mandible, because of Kilmer's letter, and a misplaced label suggesting it was from a different locality (and therefore a duplicate specimen rather than the original). Dr. Miller indicated I should arrange for the fossils to be transferred to a larger museum, as he was certain that the collection would be thrown in the garbage after he retired! I visited again two years later and set aside all the specimens that should be transferred and secured an agreement from HSU for the material to be transferred to UC Berkeley, which finally happened about five years later. I did not realize that this mandible was in fact THE mandible, or at least half of the holotype (the right mandible is still missing, presumably in that private collection) until I was able to download a much, much higher quality scan of the photographic plates in Kilmer's 1972 paper, and I was able to match barnacle scars between the published image and the fossil. So, we may not have the more complete of the two mandibles, but at least we have one of them, and it is my hope that there is more material in private collections and that more can be discovered in the future.- 4 replies
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Hey all, I'm posting this in acknowledgment of Christopher Pirrone's donation - he is @oreodont but I'm not sure he posts here that much any more. Chris was generous enough to mail this specimen to NZ in 2014 while I was doing my Ph.D. so I could prepare and study it. I molded and casted the specimen for him. Sea otter fossils are as rare as hen's teeth. Enhydra sp. Merced Formation, middle Pleistocene (670-620 Ka) San Francisco, California, USA. Donated to University of California Museum of Paleontology, Berkeley, CA. This specimen was collected from a well-dated horizon in the Merced Formation and constitutes the earliest example of a true sea otter (Enhydra) in the Pacific basin, indicating that sea otters are a recent invader from the Arctic/North Atlantic. Here's the paper: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10914-016-9373-6
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