Desmostylians, the strangest marine mammals
A whole order of hippo-like sea mammals lives along the North Pacific and leaves no descendants at all.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 7 million years
- Known to
- ± 2 million years
- Era
- Oligocene, Cenozoic
Desmostylians are the only order of marine mammals to have gone completely extinct. They are afrotherian relatives of elephants and sea cows, with barrel bodies, sprawling limbs and bizarre teeth like bundles of columns, and they lived along the North Pacific rim from Japan to Baja California. How they moved and what they ate are still argued — proposals range from seagrass grazing to bottom-suction feeding. They are a reminder that the fossil record contains entire lifestyles with no modern analogue.