Thursday, February 24, 2011

New artwork I: Cynthiacetus reconstruction

Hey folks,

Some of you cetophiles may have already seen photos of this specimen floating around on the internet. I thought the mount was pretty dynamic, and would work well as a skeletal reconstruction - so I did it. A photo of this specimen which has thus far only been identified as cf. Cynthiacetus is featured in a recent paper by Christian de Muizon.


Cynthiacetus is a dorudontine archaeocete that was originally described from the Eocene of Mississippi by Mark Uhen. He also referred a few vertebrae and a partial skeleton to this taxon from the Eocene of Egypt. This new skeleton (and I am not sure how complete it is) is from the Eocene of Peru, and is part of a large new collection of Peruvian archaeocete cetaceans we will be hearing about over the next few years.

5 comments:

Fabrizio said...

Hello!
Is Muizon (2007) the reference you talked about (french paper)?

Robert Boessenecker said...

Yes, I believe that was the year. It was a Christian de Muizon summary article, but I can only read some french, and relatively slowly at that.

Fabrizio said...

Is that "Cynthiacetus" peruvianus Martìnez-Càceres & Muizon (2011)?

http://www.bioone.org/doi/abs/10.1666/10-162.1

Robert Boessenecker said...

Fabrizio, Manuel's paper on C. peruvianus just got published a few months ago. That is one and the same.

Fabrizio said...

Many thanks!