Brachydelphis
Brachydelphis is a genus of pontoporiid known from the Late Miocene Pisco Formation of Peru and the Bahía Inglesa Formation of Chile.

Macrophyseter · CC BY 4.0 · via Wikipedia/Commons. May be a photograph of a specimen, or an artist’s reconstruction — an interpretation of a skeleton, since colour and soft tissue are almost never preserved.
On record
Recorded, not inferred- Sits inside
- PontoporiidaePBDB
- Diet
- carnivorePBDB, for Odontoceti
- Life habit
- aquatic, depth=surfacePBDB, for Cetacea
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Cetacea
- Environment
- marine,freshwaterPBDB, for Odontoceti
Time the record covers
At most 8.5 million years on record.
Every occurrence read is dated to somewhere between 13.82 Mya and 5.333 Mya, and nothing in the dating separates them, so that window is what the record shows rather than a span.
14 occurrences of Brachydelphis on record, most of them in the Miocene. Bar height is expected occurrences, not a count: each fossil is spread across the span it is dated to, so a tall narrow bar means tight dating and a low wide one means loose.
When
14 occurrences- Miocene100%
These are dates about fossils, not the animal: the record can only begin after it arose and end before it died out, so either end may reach further. Shares are expected occurrences: a fossil dated to a span is counted partly in each period it straddles. More on what this infers.
Found in
2 formations
Loading coastlines…
The named rock units Brachydelphis has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 1 occurrence has no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Brachydelphis and its relatives
MioceneWhere Brachydelphis and its relatives were recorded in the Miocene.
Found in the same rock
147 taxa- Carcharodon hastalis7 sites
- Cetotheriidae6 sites
- Otodus megalodon6 sites
- Myliobatis5 sites
- Sula5 sites
- Monachinae4 sites
- Phalacrocorax4 sites
- Phocidae4 sites
- Phocoenidae4 sites
- Spheniscidae4 sites
- Ziphiidae4 sites
- Acrophoca3 sites
- Alosidae3 sites
- Carcharhinus brachyurus3 sites
- Pelagornithidae3 sites
- Acrophyseter2 sites
- Ariidae2 sites
- Balaenopteridae2 sites
- Carcharhinus2 sites
- Carcharodon carcharias2 sites
- Cetacea2 sites
- Crocodylia2 sites
- Galeocerdo aduncus2 sites
- Heterodontus2 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 12 sites for Brachydelphis, and this reads all of them. The number is how many of those sites it was catalogued from too. The 24 sharing the most are listed.
This is not a list of everything alive at the time. It is only what has come out of the same ground as this animal and been written down.
Entered from
11 references- A new long-snouted species of the Miocene pontoporiid dolphin Brachydelphis and a review of the Mio-Pliocene marine mammal levels in the Sacaco Basin, Peru3
- Les vertebres fossiles de la Formation Pisco (Perou). Troisieme partie: Les Odontocetes (Cetacea, Mammalia) du Miocene2
- Miocene stratigraphy and vertebrate paleontology along the western side of Cerros Cadena de los Zanjones (East Pisco Basin, Peru)1
- A new late Miocene condor (Aves, Cathartidae) from Peru and the origin of South American condors1
- High concentration of long-snouted beaked whales (Genus Messapicetus) from the Miocene of Peru1
- Estado actual del conocimiento de los mamíferos fósiles de Chile1
- New sea turtle from the Miocene of Peru and iterative evolution of feeding ecomorphologies since the Cretaceous1
- Patterns of skull variation of Brachydelphis (Cetacea, Odontoceti) from the Neogene of the Southeastern Pacific1
- A new beaked whale (Odontoceti, Ziphiidae) from the middle Miocene of Peru1
- The southernmost sirenian record in the eastern Pacific Ocean, from the Late Miocene of Chile1
- Descripcion preliminar de una nueva especie de cetaceo fosil (Odontoceti, Pontoporiidae) en el Mioceno de la Formacion Bahia Inglesa, Tercera Region, Chile1
Each of the 14 occurrences read was entered from one of these publications, ordered by how many each accounts for. This is not a search for papers mentioning the name. Entries link to doi.org where the Paleobiology Database holds an identifier, and to its own record where it does not. Relayed as the Paleobiology Database holds them, not checked against what they resolve to.
Media and terms
Media content1
Picture of Brachydelphis
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Macrophyseter
- Licence
- CC BY 4.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Brachydelphis was found in Sketchfab.
Smithsonian Open Access and MorphoSource were not reached for this taxon, so this list is what the others held rather than everything there is.
The description on this site
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 4.0
This is what the site found, which is not the same as what exists.
Keep going
What may have been alongside itPontoporiidae through timeFormations of the MioceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Muizon 1988