Pebanista yacuruna is the closest relative of living South Asian river dolphins (genus Platanista).
Pebanista yacuruna lived in the Miocene proto-Amazonia of Peru approximately 16 million years ago.
The ancient dolphin had an estimated body length of 2.8 to 3.5 m (9.2-11.5 feet), making it the largest freshwater species of odontocete (dolphins, porpoises, and all other whales possessing teeth) known.
Such a large size, also recorded in other proto-Amazonia inhabitants (i.e. fishes and crocodilians), might be attributed to the large resource availability in proto-Amazonian ecosystems.
“Sixteen million years ago, the Peruvian Amazonia looked very different from what it is today,” said Dr. Aldo Benites-Palomino, a paleontologist at the University of Zurich.
“Much of the Amazonian plain was covered by a large system of lakes and swamps called Pebas.”
“This landscape included aquatic, semi-aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems (swamps, floodplains, etc.) and stretched across what is today Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru and Brazil.”
“When the Pebas system began to give way to modern Amazonia about 10 million years ago, new habitats caused Pebanista yacuruna’s prey to disappear, driving the giant dolphin to extinction.”
“This opened an ecological niche that was exploited by relatives of today’s Amazon river dolphins (genus Inia), which were also facing extinction in the oceans due to the rise of new cetaceans, such as modern oceanic dolphins.”
Holotype skull of Pebanista yacuruna. Image credit: Benites-Palomino et al., doi: 10.1126/sciadv.adk6320.
Pebanista yacuruna was a member of Platanistoidea, a group of dolphins that were common in the world’s oceans between 24 and 16 million years ago.
“We discovered that its size is not the only remarkable aspect,” said Dr. Aldo Benites-Palomino, a paleontologist at the University of Zurich and the Museo de Historia Natural-Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos.
“With this fossil record unearthed in the Amazon, we expected to find close relatives of the living Amazon River dolphin, but instead the closest cousins of Pebanista yacuruna are the South Asian river dolphins.”
“Pebanista yacuruna and Platanista both share highly developed facial crests, which are specialized bony structures associated with echolocation — the ability to ‘see’ by emitting high-frequency sounds and listening or their echoes, which they rely on heavily for hunting.”
“For river dolphins, echolocation, or biosonar, is even more critical as the waters they inhabit are extremely muddy, which impedes their vision,” said Dr. Gabriel Aguirre-Fernández, a paleontologist at the University of Zurich.
“The elongated snout with many teeth suggests that Pebanista yacuruna fed on fish, as other species of river dolphins do today.”
A large skull from an adult individual of Pebanista yacuruna was found in 2018 in stratigraphic levels exposed along the Rio Napo, Loreto, Peru.
“After two decades of work in South America we had found several giant forms from the region, but this is the first dolphin of its kind,” said Dr. Marcelo Sánchez-Villagra, a paleontologist at the University of Zurich.
“We were especially intrigued by its peculiar biogeographical deep-time history.”
The team’s paper was published March 20, 2024 in the journal Science Advances.
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Aldo Benites-Palomino et al. 2024. The largest freshwater odontocete: A South Asian river dolphin relative from the proto-Amazonia. Science Advances 10 (12); doi: 10.1126/sciadv.adk6320