#romaleodelphis

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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An attempted at a size comparison of Romaleodelphis, the recently described "dolphin" from the Miocene of Austria. I couldn't find any good material of the closely related Chilcacetus, so instead based the proportions more on eurhinodelphinids, so take the size with a grain of salt.

Romaleodelphis is a recently described species from the Early Miocene Konservatlagerstätte at Pucking, Upper Austria, which preserves fauna dating to the early Miocene when much of eastern Austria was underwater. A somewhat generalized depiction of this time was actually drawn very recently by @knuppitalism-with-ue (I still got a half-written reblog of his piece sitting in my drafts). Of these animals, the giant sunfish Austromola and the loon Petralca are both from the same locality as Romaleodelphis, which sadly didn't make it in on account of having been named just a week too late.