A 45-million-year-old cetacean brain exhibits prominent olfactory regions, indicating that early whales retained a sense of smell 🐳🧠.

RT @PriscilaRothier: Thrilled to share our new paper out in BMC, a part of my postdoc at @cornellvet! 🐘🐀.We found that larger mammals evolv….

You can find the accompanying models on MorphoMuseuM here: 

This study is the result of Elena Berger’s Bachelor’s thesis, conducted in collaboration with @AmsonEli, @Gohar_A_S, and many other co-authors. Thanks to Tyler Stone @tylerstoneart for the nice reconstruction!

Regarding the sense of smell, we basically found that no part of the olfactory apparatus was significantly reduced, indicating that these amphibious cetaceans most likely had a good nose, and that the reduction of this sense most likely came later in their evolution.

Comparing the relative volume of the brain endocast, we found that this early whale was quite brainy, which is a surprise, as the first cetaceans with big brains were so far understood to be the fully aquatic basilosaurids.

We addressed two aspects of cetacean evolution: their acquisition of a relatively big brain and the evolution of their sense of smell. As other mammals secondarily adapted to the aquatic environment, cetaceans have been assumed to reduce their sense of smell.

We ct-scanned the skull of Protocetus atavus, an amphibious cetacean coming from the Mokattam Formation in Egypt. The inner anatomy of the skull was reconstructed, and we were able to reconstruct the brain imprint (endocast) as well as the different components of the nasal cavity

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RT @ComdrSalamander: 🦤🧬🧑‍🔬 Junior Group Leader in Conservation Genomics Wanted! 🪲🌿🔬 .Help bridge gaps between evolutionary genetics & conse….

RT @AnatRecord: Crown primates all have reduced olfactory bulbs, but this feature continued to evolve with rampant parallelism! Learn more….

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