With a big construct and a downturned snout lined with delicate bristles, dugongs (Dugong dugontoday resemble their loved ones, manatees.

The one secret distinction in between these marine herbivores, which are typically called sea cows, is their tails: a manatee’s tail is rounded like a paddle while a dugong’s fluked tail is more comparable to that of a dolphin.

Dugongs populate seaside waters from western Africa through the Indo-Pacific and into northern Australia.

The Arabian Gulf is home to the biggest private herd of dugongs on the planet, where the sea cows work as essential community engineers.

As they chomp on seagrass, dugongs improve the seafloor by producing feeding tracks that release buried nutrients into the surrounding water for other marine animals and plants to utilize.

“We found a remote relative of dugongs in rocks less than 16 km (10 miles) far from a bay with seagrass meadows that comprise their prime environment today,” stated Dr. Nicholas Pyenson, the manager of fossil marine mammals at the National Museum of Natural History.

“This part of the world has actually been prime sea cow environment for the previous 21 million years– it’s simply that the sea cow function has actually been inhabited by various types in time.”

Couple of locations protect as much of these bones as Al Maszhabiya, a fossil website in southwestern Qatar.

The bonebed was at first found when geologists performed mining and petroleum studies in the 1970s and kept in mind plentiful ‘reptile’ bones spread throughout the desert.

In the early 2000s, paleontologists went back to the location and rapidly understood that the fossils were not from ancient reptiles however sea cows.

Based upon the surrounding rocks, Dr. Pyenson and his coworkers dated the bonebed to the Early Miocene date around 21 million years earlier.

They revealed fossils that exposed that this location was when a shallow marine environment lived in by sharks, barracuda-like fish, ancient dolphins and sea turtles.

They determined more than 170 various places consisting of sea cow fossils throughout the Al Maszhabiya website.

This makes the bonebed the wealthiest assemblage of fossilized sea cow bones on the planet.

The fossilized bones at Al Maszhabiya looked like the skeletons of living dugongs. The ancient sea cows still had hind limb bones, which contemporary dugongs and manatees have actually lost through their advancement.

The website’s ancient sea cows likewise had a straighter snout and smaller sized tusks than their living family members.

The scientists explained Al Maszhabiya’s fossil sea cows as a brand-new types, Salwasiren qatarensis

“It appeared just fitting to utilize the nation’s name for the types as it plainly indicates where the fossils were found,” stated Dr. Ferhan Sakal, a scientist at Qatar Museums.

At an approximated 113 kg (250 pounds), Salwasiren qatarensis would have weighed as much as an adult panda or a heavyweight fighter.

It was still amongst the smaller sized sea cow types ever found. Some contemporary dugongs are almost 8 times much heavier than Salwasiren qatarensis

Based upon the fossils, the scientists presume that this area consisted of numerous seagrass beds more than 20 million years earlier, throughout a time in Earth’s history when the Gulf was a hotspot for biodiversity. Tending to these marine pastures were sea cows.

“The density of the Al Maszhabiya bonebed offers us a huge hint that Salwasiren qatarensis played the function of a seagrass environment engineer in the Early Miocene the manner in which dugongs do today,” Dr. Pyenson stated.

“There’s been a complete replacement of the evolutionary stars however not their eco-friendly functions.”

The group’s discovery is reported in a paper released online in the journal PeerJ

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N.D. Pyenson et al2025. High abundance of Early Miocene sea cows from Qatar reveals duplicated development of seagrass community engineers in Eastern Tethys. PeerJ 13: e20030; doi: 10.7717/ peerj.20030