The coast found the remains of strange creatures

Scientists believe that it was an active predator.

A team of paleontologists have discovered in Paleogene sediments near Charleston (South. Carolina, USA) petrified fossil remains of a Dolphin that lived about 30 million years ago.

Characteristic findings, which received the official name Inermorostrum xenops, is the lack of teeth. It sounds a bit strange, because in the modern world, dolphins are considered toothed whales. But it’s true.

Very small (about a meter in length) marine mammal lived about the period when the evolutionary path of baleen and toothed whales finally parted. First learned quiet “to fish”, by sieving the water for the sake of making the plankton, the second became hunters — experts in catching fish and cephalopods.

It seems that the development of both groups of marine mammals was not as linear as it may seem. Whales, which later became the baleen, was also at least one “renegade” — Janjucetus hunderi, is characterized by the presence of teeth in the absence of signs of whalebone. I believe that it was an active predator.

It is not clear what and how to eat our today’s hero. The authors findings I think that the short and downward curved jaw give him an expert on fishing who lived at the bottom of the soft-bodied fauna — molluscs and small fish. Perhaps the production sucks, and to keep it helped muscular lips, but to verify them, of course, impossible — fossilized skull does not.

The scientists believe that the tooth loss with the development of the ancestral forms, in which the teeth were, it took about four million years.

In any case, it should be recognized that such a creature was. It is very likely that the subsequent work of paleontologists will be able to tell us more about its structure and life.

paradox