Celebrities from the Past - A walking seal?

A reproduction of how Pujilia might have looked - Image from LiveScience

The frozen wastes of the Canadian Arctic is well, not really a waste. Especially if you find some really sweet fossils that give you answers to missing links in evolution. American and Canadian researchers have unearthed the fossilized remains of what they call a ‘walking seal.’ It sheds light on pinnipeds, a group that includes seals, sea lions and walruses. They have named it puijila darwini, a combination of the Inuktitut word for young sea mammal and the name of Charles Darwin. In fact, Darwin had envisioned the existence of such a creature in his book, “The Origin of Species.”

Pujilia’s significance is that it not only provides a glimpse into the earliest stages of evolutionary transition but also that it is now the oldest evidence of a pinniped. The environment in, which the seal lived was also vastly different from the icy landscape that it is today. Devon Island was a warm, coastal forest 20 million years ago during the time of Pujilia with diverse wildlife inhabiting the island. How the pinnipeds shifted from such an atmosphere, from land to sea, will be revealed to some extent by examining Pujilia’s remains.

The expedition was led by paleontologist Natalia Rybczynski from the Canadian Museum of Nature who found the bones of the seal in the Haughton crater on Devon Island in 2007 and her findings have now been published in the journal Nature.

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