A team of have uncovered a new species of extinct walrus that lived roughly 5.3 million years ago. bears some surprising similarities in feeding adaptations to the .
The new walrus is described in a and highlights an intriguing case of convergent evolution in these large Millions of years ago, there were . Now, there is only with two subspecies–the Atlantic Walrus and . The fossilized remains of were .
The Belgian specimens were uncovered by study co-author while working on his thesis in 2020. “I noticed that some fossil walrus mandibles differed from what was previously known,” Boisville, now a PhD and paleontologist at the University of Tsukuba in Japan, tells . “Furthermore, the holotype (i.
e. the type fossil that takes the species as its reference) had never been described, although it had been mentioned by some researchers.” In the , the team conducted a detailed analysis of the mandible, since they initially thought it was the species They found that the new specimen had a unique combination of features.
It has post-canine teeth, a larger lower canine, and a . According to the team, these anatomical characteristics suggest that similar to its living relatives. “The modern walrus won’t arrive in the North Atlantic until the end of the Middle Pleistocene [about 200,000 years ago], yet a now-extinct walrus species (i.
e. ) was already present in the North Atlantic at the beginning of the (5.3 million years ago),” says Boisville.
“Modern walruses live in th.