Paleontologists have discovered a dense accumulation of dugong remains at the site of Al Masjabiya in the Early Miocene Dam Formation in Qatar. This fossil site shows that sea cow communities with different species repeatedly evolved in the Gulf over the past 20 million years. One of these species, called Salvasiren catarensisis new to science.
Artistic reconstruction of a herd Salvasiren catarensis foraging for food on the seabed. Image credit: Alex Boersma.
Strong build, drooping muzzle with sensitive stubble. dugong (dugong dugong) today they look like their relatives, manatees.
The only key difference between these aquatic herbivores, often called sea cows, is their tails: a manatee's tail is rounded like an oar, while a dugong's tail is more like a dolphin's.
Dugongs live in coastal waters from West Africa through the Indo-Pacific region to northern Australia.
The Arabian Gulf is home to the largest individual dugong herd in the world, where sea cows serve as important ecosystem engineers.
By eating seagrass, dugongs reshape the seafloor, creating nutrient trails that release buried nutrients into the surrounding water for use by other aquatic animals and plants.
“We discovered a distant relative of the dugong in the cliffs less than 16 km (10 miles) from the bay in the seagrass meadows that today constitute their main habitat,” said Dr Nicholas Pyenson, curator of fossil marine mammals at the National Museum of Natural History.
“This part of the world has been the primary habitat for sea cows for the last 21 million years—it’s just that the role of sea cows has been occupied by different species over time.”
Few sites preserve as many of these bones as Al Masjabiyah, a fossil site in southwest Qatar.
The bone bed was originally discovered when geologists were conducting mining and oil surveys in the 1970s and noticed a large number of “reptile” bones scattered across the desert.
In the early 2000s, paleontologists returned to the area and quickly realized that the fossils were not ancient reptiles, but sea cows.
Based on surrounding rocks, Dr. Pyenson and his colleagues dated the bonebed to the Early Miocene era, about 21 million years ago.
They discovered fossils that showed the area was once a shallow marine environment inhabited by sharks, barracuda-like fish, prehistoric dolphins and sea turtles.
They identified more than 170 different sites containing sea cow fossils across Al Masjabiyah.
This makes the bonebed the richest assemblage of fossilized sea cow bones in the world.
The fossilized bones at Al Masjabiya resembled the skeletons of living dugongs. However, ancient sea cows still possessed hind limb bones that modern dugongs and manatees have lost during evolution.
The site's prehistoric sea cows also had straighter muzzles and smaller tusks than their living relatives.
Researchers have described Al Masjabiyah's sea cow fossils as a new species. Salvasiren catarensis.
“It seemed appropriate to use the country name for this species as it clearly indicates where the fossils were found,” said Dr Ferhan Sakal, a researcher at Qatar Museums.
Approximately 113 kg (250 lb), Salvasiren catarensis would weigh the same as an adult panda or a heavyweight boxer.
But it was still one of the smallest sea cow species ever discovered. Some modern dugongs are almost eight times heavier Salvasiren catarensis.
Based on fossils, researchers suggest that the region contained abundant seagrass beds more than 20 million years ago, during a period in Earth's history when the Persian Gulf was a biodiversity hotspot. These aquatic pastures were tended by sea cows.
“The density of the Al Masjabiya bone layer gives us a big clue that Salvasiren catarensis played a role as an engineer of the seagrass ecosystem in the early Miocene, as dugongs do today,” Dr Pyenson said.
“There has been a complete replacement of the participants in evolution, but not their ecological roles.”
The opening of the team is announced in paper published online in magazine PJ.
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N. D. Panson etc.. 2025. High abundance of early Miocene sea cows from Qatar reveals repeated evolution of seagrass ecosystem engineers in Eastern Tethys. PJ 13: e20030; two: 10.7717/peerj.20030
