Origins

Make sure to check out our latest ScienceNOW on the discovery of Puijila darwini, reported today in Nature. Puijila fills a fossil gap in the evolution of seals, sea lions, walruses, and other pinnipeds, by being the first of its kind to be found with legs and webbed feet in place of flippers. The fossil provides a glimpse of a terrestrial animal making the transition to an ocean-going creature.

Puijila dwelled in a freshwater habitat, suggesting an intermediate freshwater phase in pinniped evolution. The researchers chose the species name to pay tribute to Charles Darwin, who predicted a transitional land to sea creature with just that type of an intermediate stage in his seminal work On the Origin of Species: "A strictly terrestrial animal, by occasionally hunting for food in shallow water, then in streams or lakes, might have at last be converted into an animal so thoroughly aquatic as to brave the open ocean." Puijila means "young sea mammal" in Inuktitut, a native language of the Inuit people inhabiting the territory in which the fossil was found.

—Jackie Grom

Image Credit: Mark A. Klingler