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What are 3 examples of pinnipeds?
Pinnipeds are separated into three groups: earless seals, eared seals and walruses. Sometimes referred to as earless seals or true seals, marine mammals in the phocid family can be easily identified by looking at their ears and flippers.
What’s the definition of a pinniped?
Definition of pinniped : any of an order or suborder (Pinnipedia) of aquatic carnivorous mammals (such as a seal or walrus) with all four limbs modified into flippers.
Which animal is classified as a pinniped?
The pinnipeds are a group of 33 species of aquatic fin-footed mammals composing three families: the true seals (family Phocidae), the fur seals and sea lions (family Otariidae), and the walrus (family Odobenidae). Pinnipeds live only in rich marine environments and a few inland or tropical freshwater systems.
Is a penguin a pinniped?
Diet is strictly carnivorous, but pinnipeds eat a variety of prey ranging in size from krill, which is filtered from the water by the complex cheek teeth, to, in the case of the leopard seal (Hydrurga leptonyx), penguins and even other pinnipeds.
Is an otter a pinniped?
Common Pinnipeds & Otters In addition to Cetaceans, the Salish Sea is home to many other marine mammals including, otters, seals, and sea lions. There are five species of Pinnipeds found in BC, including 2 species of sea lion and 3 species of seal, as well as two species of otter.
Is a whale a pinniped?
Marine mammals are classified into four different taxonomic groups: cetaceans (whales, dolphins, and porpoises), pinnipeds (seals, sea lions, and walruses), sirenians (manatees and dugongs), and marine fissipeds (polar bears and sea otters).
Is a walrus a pinniped?
Walrus are the largest pinniped. Seals, sea lions, and walruses belong to a group of marine mammals called pinnipeds, referring to their flippered feet. Seals (true seals or earless seals) have no external ear flaps.
Is an elephant seal a pinniped?
Pinnipeds are carnivorous marine mammals with fin-like limbs. They breathe air like humans and other mammals, reptiles and birds, but they spend most of their time at sea. Pinnipeds include “true seals”, sea lions, fur seals and walruses. Elephant seals are the largest of the true seals.
How are pinnipeds different from sirenians?
Also like modern whales, modern sirenians lack external hind limbs, have their forelimbs modified into flippers, and have flukes on their tails for locomotion. Pinnipeds are semi-aquatic and all pinnipeds retain hind limbs. In pinnipeds, both the fore and hindlimbs are modified into flippers.
What did pinnipeds evolved from?
Pinnipeds evolved from the ancestors of the musteloids which include everything from the red panda to skunks, badgers weasels, and raccoons. One potential ancestor was Puijila, an otter-like creature with a long tail and webbed feet that likely lived by freshwater lakes about 24 million years ago.
Where did phocids evolve from?
Other early fossil phocids date from the mid-Miocene, 15 million years ago in the north Atlantic. Until recently, many researchers believed that phocids evolved separately from otariids and odobenids; and that they evolved from otter-like animals, such as Potamotherium, which inhabited European freshwater lakes.
Why did seals evolve like that?
Seals evolved from carnivorous ancestors that walked on land with sturdy legs; only later did these evolve into the flippers that the family is known for. Now, a beautifully new fossil called Puijila illustrates just what such early steps in seal evolution looked like.
How old are pinnipeds?
The oldest definitive pinniped fossils date from approximately 30.6–23 million years ago (Ma) in the North Pacific. Pinniped monophyly is consistently supported; the group shares a common ancestry with arctoid carnivorans, either ursids or musteloids.
What type of animal is a pinniped?
Pinnipeds (pronounced / ˈpɪnɪˌpɛdz / ), commonly known as seals, are a widely distributed and diverse clade of carnivorous, fin -footed, semiaquatic, mostly marine mammals.
What is the closest relative to pinnipeds?
A closer relative of extant pinnipeds was Pteronarctos, which lived in Oregon 19–15 mya. As in modern seals, Pteroarctos had an orbital wall that was not limited by certain facial bones (like the jugal or lacrimal bone ), but was mostly shaped by the maxilla.
Is Enaliarctos a Pinnipedimorpha?
In 1989, Annalisa Berta and colleagues proposed the unranked clade Pinnipedimorpha to contain the fossil genus Enaliarctos and modern seals as a sister group. Pinnipeds belong to the order Carnivora and the suborder Caniformia (known as dog-like carnivorans). Pinnipedia was historically considered its own suborder under Carnivora.
Do pinnipeds compete with humans?
Pinnipeds and humans may compete for space and resources. Some species have become so numerous that they conflict with local people. In the United States, pinnipeds are protected under the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972 (MMPA). Since that year, California sea lion populations have risen to 250,000.