Prehistoric Mammal Discoveries of 2019

Nehalaennia, an 8 million-year-old rorqual
from the Netherlands, first described this year

As the year - and decade - approach their inevitable conclusion, it's time again to look back at a few palaeontological findings of 2019 that didn't, for whatever reason, make it into the regular Synapsida posts. As always, there is no theme to this list, just a sample of what seemed interesting linked only by when it happened to be published.

New Mammal Species 2016

Reticulated giraffes

2016 has, on the whole, been a bit of a rubbish year. Or so the common wisdom has it; one suspects that, for instance, the deaths of some particularly prominent celebrities at the beginning of the year has heightened our perception of those that died later on (relative to any other given year). And it's probably been quite a good year for you if happen to be a Trump supporter, or a fan of Nigel Farage.

But that debate doesn't belong here, instead, as the year draws to a close, it's time to take a survey of the species of mammal that have been newly discovered this year. Or, more accurately, newly named, since what we generally do these days is find some population of a previously known species that turns out not to belong to it, and to be something else instead. There have, as always, been a fair number of them this year, and there's no guarantee that they'll all stand the test of time, and still be considered valid species in, say, 2026.

My survey is, therefore, inevitably biased, with a just a semi-random sample of some of the species announcements I happen to have come across. Most of them are going to be small animals, since they're easier to overlook in the first place, but there are a couple of quite large ones. And, by "large", I don't mean just "wolf-sized", either.

Deep Dives to Dark Depths

There are something like ninety species of cetacean, which are usually grouped into fourteen families. Perhaps the most obscure and little known of these families - and among the most obscure of all mammal families - is that of the beaked whales. It's actually quite a large family, with over twenty species, representing almost a quarter of all known cetacean species, and around a half of all those that are noticeably larger than dolphin-sized. And, since they typically weigh a ton or more, they're hardly small themselves.

The main reason we know so little is where they live. These are deep-water animals, that rarely come in close to shore, and so just aren't seen very often. Combine this with the fact that they're mostly of little interest to whalers, and it becomes apparent that studying them is neither easy, nor likely to be commercially motivated.

News in Brief #3

The Mandrill's Face

There are a number of colourful primates, but one of the more instantly recognisable is surely the mandrill (Mandrillus sphinx) whose adult males have strikingly blue and red faces. Under a strict definition, mandrills aren't really baboons, but they're very closely related to them, and the difference is pretty academic. Given that only the adult males have these extreme face-markings it's not surprising to learn that they are there mainly to advertise their masculinity and fitness as a potential father to female mandrills.

A study from 2005 confirmed that, yes, indeed, female mandrills find males with bright red noses to be particularly sexy. Oddly, though, until now nobody appears to have looked at what the bright blue patches on either side of the nose are for. In the new study, Julien Renoult and co-workers confirmed that the blue colour is more intense in dominant males, just as the red is. Indeed, it seems that what's really important is the contrast between the two. This suggests that, in the distant past, mandrills developed the red nose as a measure of their fitness, and the redder the nose, the more females liked them. So the noses of dominant males became ever redder... but there's only so red a nose can get. When some males began to develop a contrasting colour elsewhere on the snouts, the redness of their noses became more obvious, and, over the course of evolution, the bright blue/red contrast we see now developed.