14 DAY TRIAL // In a recent paper in the UK Royal Society's journal Biology Letters, specialists describe a new species of fur seal. Odd looks aside, what makes this newly discovered fur seal species super cool is the fact that it lived a long, long time ago.
Thus, researchers say that these creatures populated our planet's seas and oceans an impressive 15 to 17 million years ago. They go on to detail that, prior to the discovery of this new species, the lineage of fur seals only went back to about 10 to 12 million years ago.
How the new species was discovered
The fossilized remains that show that fur seals have been swimming Earth's seas and oceans for about 17 million years were recovered in the early 1980s from an ancient rock formation in California, US.
At first, paleontologists assumed them to belong to a walrus species. Hence, the bones were sent to a research facility that now goes by the name of the John D. Cooper Archaeological and Paleontological Center, where they were put in storage.
Not too long ago, University of Otago specialist Robert Boessenecker chanced to stumble upon them and decided to have a closer look at them. He eventually identified them as belonging to a previously unknown fur seal species.
Introducing the oldest known fur seal
As detailed in the journal Biology Letters, the newly discovered ancient fur seal species now goes by the name of Eotaria crypta. By the looks of it, it emerged around the same time as the ancestors of sea lions and walruses did.
Paleontologist Robert Boessenecker and fellow researcher Morgan Churchill with the University of Wyoming say that, size-wise, these ancient ocean dwellers looked nothing like the fur seal that now inhabit our planet.
On the contrary, they were only ever so slightly larger than an average sea otter. In fact, Robert Boessenecker and Morgan Churchill say that adult Eotaria crypta specimens were about as big as juvenile New Zealand fur seals are.
Seeing how fossilized remains left behind by such creatures have so far only been recovered from one archaeological site in California, US, it's safe to assume that these ancient fur seals spent most of their life in the open ocean and only rarely ventured on the continental shelf.