Today’s oceangoing dolphins have snouts that would be considered on the short side, ranging from the flattish bumps of orcas to the bottle noses of, well, bottlenoses. River dolphins have more extended snouts that can be almost twice as long as the rest of their skulls. But an extinct species of dolphin, the Eurhinodelphis, had a snout that was five times longer than its braincase, writes The Atlantic.
Matthew McCurry, a paleontologist, found a fossil collection containing Eurhinodelphis’s skulls at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, along with other similar species of dolphins. All had long snouts, and some had more teeth than any other mammal on the planet.
Why did this particular dolphin have such an extreme snout? The species was not all part of the same lineage but instead evolved from short-snouted ancestors on at least three different occasions.
“There must have been something going on in their environment at the same time to drive their evolution,” says McCurry, according to The Atlantic.
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