Australodelphis mirus is an extinct Pliocene dolphin. A. mirus is known from fossils found in the Sørsdal Formation, Mule Peninsula, Vestfold Hills, East Antarctica. The genus has been described as an example of convergent evolution with beaked whales.
Australodelphis mirus is an extinct Pliocene dolphin. A. mirus is known from fossils found in the Sørsdal Formation, Mule Peninsula, Vestfold Hills, East Antarctica. The genus has been described as an example of convergent evolution with beaked whales.
==Name history== The generic name Australodelphis is derived from the Latin australis meaning southern and delphis meaning dolphin, in reference to its discovery in Antarctica. The species name mirus is Latin for strange or wonderful, and was chosen to reflect the unexpected morphology of the type specimen. While not described until 2002, the type specimen of A. mirus was collected between 1985 and 1986, and a further four specimens were found between 1986 and 1994. Prior to the description of Australodelphis in 2002, the genus was mentioned briefly in several publications between 1988 and 1993. The holotype skull was figured in 1988 by R. E. Fordyce and Australodelphis mirus first appeared as a nomen nudum in E. H. Colbert's 1991 "Mesozoic and Cainozoic tetrapod fossils from Antarctica". A second species of Australodelphis was noted by R. E. Fordyce and P. G. Quilty in their 1993 publication on the stratigraphic context of the Marine Plain sediments, but this second species has yet to be formally described.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).