'Anzac dolphin' fossil equivalent to discovering Aussie rhino

[edd]

No one knew what lay within the grey chunk of rock - or how significant it would prove to be.

For decades it sat forgotten and unloved in a museum warehouse in Melbourne's outer suburbs. For millennia before that, it languished on a Victorian beach.

Erich Fitzgerald with one of the dolphin fossils he removed from the Jan Juc rock. Photo: Pat Scala

Then one wintry day in 2003 researcher Erich Fitzgerald spotted it amongst the crates and pallets.

It was the dark chocolate brown lines on the surface of the rock that caught his eye. They provided the first clue. To most of us they'd be unremarkable. But they were enough to draw him in for a closer look. Were they prehistoric bones?

The position of bones in the rock before they were extracted. Photo: Erich Fitzgerald

"I got this surge of adrenaline and thought 'hey wait a minute, no one else has cottoned on to what is here'," he said.

The label stated the 100 kilogram lump had been collected by renowned palaeontologist Tom Rich in 1976 from the western end of Jan Juc beach - another hint it could contain something special.

Extracting the fossil from the 25-million-year-old rock was a big job - it took a good 12 months.

What he discovered will rewrite what we know about the prehistoric beasts that lived on our patch.

One of the fossils found in the grey rock, decades after it was retrieved from a Victorian beach. Photo: Pat Scala

"This is the equivalent today of discovering that the rhino lived in Australia," Dr Fitzgerald said. "In terms of the fossil record this represents an entire family that we didn't even know lived here."

Chipping away at the rock at a Melbourne Museum laboratory, the layer of broken rib pieces soon made way for a collection flipper bones, organised as they would be in a living animal. This was no rhino.

While the vertebrae were eroded, broken and not particularly informative, the teeth revealed what he was holding.

Here lay the fossilised remains of an extinct dolphin, belonging to a family that had never before been seen in Australian waters. The only other place in the southern hemisphere the dolphin had been found was off the south island of New Zealand, prompting Dr Fitzgerald to nickname it "the Anzac dolphin".

An artists' impression of the ''ANZAC dolphin''. Photo: Carl Buell

The primitive dolphin, known as a Waipatiid, had super-sharp teeth resembling fangs at the front and free-standing teeth at the back of the jaw for tearing and shearing small fish and squid.

"While it looks fierce, it would have been prey to monstrous sharks that were larger than a great white," Dr Fitzgerald said.

At no more than four metres this was an adult, not yet fully-grown. But it represents so much more than that.

This dolphin lived at a particularly interesting time. About 25 million years ago the two major types of whales and dolphins - the baleen and toothed whales - were starting to diversify into the forms we see today. It was an explosive period of experimentation in whale evolution. However we know precious little about it.

"This is really the final frontier of Australian paleontology," he said. "This quest to uncover the pre-history of whales, dolphins and other marine creatures in Australia is only just beginning. And this find is fundamental to that."

http://www.theage.com.au/technology/sci-tech/anzac-dolphin-fossil-equivalent-to-discovering-aussie-rhino-20160722-gqbg9z.html

Edited July 27, 2016 by edd

[ynot]

Thanks edd!!

Tony

[Boesse]

Erich is a good friend of mine - we've got similar, but unpublished dolphins thought to be "waipatiids" here at CCNHM in Charleston: https://blogs.cofc.edu/macebrownmuseum/files/2016/05/IMG_4207-1dx7u4h.jpg

My Ph.D. adviser, R.E. Fordyce, originally described Waipatia maerewhenua in 1994. My labmate & officemate Yoshi Tanaka focused on 'waipatiid' dolphins for his Ph.D. thesis, and as a result our office was always cluttered with waipatiid dolphins and eomysticetid baleen whales collected from the Oligocene of NZ. What would eventually be the Otekaikea huata holotype and the renamed Otekaikea marplesi holotype spent quite a bit of time on the bench behind my chair.