Romaleodelphis

An illustration of the extinct cetacean Romaleodelphis, which resembles a dolphin with a long thin snout and a low triangular dorsal fin. It's depicted in a swimming pose, and with striped grey and white markings.

Romaleodelphis pollerspoecki was a dolphin-like toothed whale related to the ancestors of both modern oceanic dolphins and beaked whales, living in coastal waters covering what is now Austria during the early Miocene about 22 million years ago.

Although only known from a single fossil skull, this cetacean was probably around 3m long (~9’10”). It had a long snout lined with over 100 small pointed uniformly-shaped teeth, and the bony walls of its inner ears were well-preserved enough to show that it was able to hear narrow-band high frequency sounds – a specific form of echolocation that has convergently evolved multiple times in various modern and extinct toothed whale lineages.

Based on the presence of ancient river-mouth deposits in the area where Romaleodelphis was found, it may potentially have been capable of traversing between marine, brackish, and freshwater environments similar to the modern franciscana.

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One thought on “Romaleodelphis”

  1. Dear Creator of the Romaleodelphis reconstruction,

    I am the senior author of the paper and I am pleased that you got so inspired of our fossil and work to bring it to live.

    As Romaleodelphis will be put on display in the exhibition category “Fossil of the Month” of our little Palaeontological Museum in Munich, Germany, we’d be very happy, if we receive the permission to use the reconstruction for the exhibition and the accompanying flyer as well, which will be provided analog and digital on our museum’s webpage.

    Our museum is a non-profit institution and we don’t take entrance fee.

    We’d be happy to give the artist credits.

    Thank You!

    Gertrud Rößner

    Reply

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