LOS ANGELES, CA.- Dr. Xiaoming Wang, Curator and Head of Vertebrate Paleontology at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and Dr. Denise Su, Curator and Head of Paleobotany and Paleoecology at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History published a paper in The Journal of Systematic Paleontology on the discovery of one of the largest otter species ever found. This discovery was made in the Yunnan Province, Southwestern China, by an international team of scientists from the United States, France, and China. It represents groundbreaking research into the evolution of a little known fossil genus of the otter family.

This newly discovered species of otter, Siamogale melilutra, belongs to an ancient lineage of extinct otters that was previously known only from isolated teeth recovered from Thailand. The discovery of a complete cranium, mandible, dentition, and various skeletal elements at Shuitangba provides information about the taxonomy, evolutionary history, and functional morphology of this new species. The fossil is 6.24 million years old.

“While the cranium is incredibly complete, it was flattened during the fossilization process. The bones were so delicate that we could not physically restore the cranium. Instead, we CTscanned the specimen and virtually reconstructed it in a computer,” said Dr. Denise Su. The CT restoration revealed a combination of otter- and badger-like cranial and dental features, hence its species name, “melilutra,” which refers to meles, Latin for badger and lutra, Latin for otter.

Siamogale melilutra was about the size of a wolf and weighed approximately 110 pounds, almost twice as large as the largest living otters. It had a large and powerful jaw, with enlarged, bunodont (rounded-cusped) cheek teeth. These characteristics appear to have been adaptations for eating large shellfish and freshwater mollusks, both of which were found in abundance at Shuitangba. “From the vegetation and other animal groups found at Shuitangba, we know that it was a swampy, shallow lake with quite dense vegetation,” said Su.

“Multiple otter lineages have low-crowned, bunodont teeth, leading us to ask the question if this was inherited from a common ancestor or if this was convergent evolution based on common dietary behaviors across different species,” said Dr. Xiaoming Wang, lead author of the paper. “Our phylogenetic analysis suggests that bunodont dentition independently appeared at least three times over the evolutionary history of otters.”

The completeness of the specimens from Shuitangba allows the scientists to better understand the evolutionary history of otters and specifically of this enigmatic genus from the Miocene of which there had been little information. The findings from Shuitangba reveal that Siamogale belongs to one of the oldest and most primitive lineages of the otter family, which goes back at least 18 million years in the form of Paralutra from Europe.

This groundbreaking discovery now has scientists trying to understand other aspects of the life of Siamogale melilutra. “The discovery of the otter helps solve some questions about otter relationships, but has opened the door to new questions,” said Wang. “For instance, why was it so large, how did it cracked open mollusks and shellfish for food, and how did it move in the water and on land?”

“Continued future studies by our group will address these fundamental questions and give us a more complete picture of its paleobiology,” said Su.