Ancient ugly-cute dolphin was tiny, toothless, and whiskery

Scientists on Wednesday unveiled an extinct species of toothless, whiskered and subjectively cute mini-dolphin that plied Earth’s oceans some 30 million years ago.

With only a fossilised cranium - found in a river near Charleston, South Carolina - to work with, the researchers were able to reconstruct the snub-nosed mammal’s evolutionary saga, describe its facial features and figure out what it snacked on.

Just over a metre from snout to tail, Inermorostrum xenops was half the size of the common bottlenose dolphin.

Ironically, the gummy pint-sized Flipper was an early offshoot from one of the two main groupings of cetaceans called Odontoceti, or “toothed whale”, that includes sperm whales and orca.

“Inermorostrum took only four million years to evolve from ancestral whales with precisely occluding teeth” - matching top and bottom - “into a toothless, suction-feeding specialist,” explained Robert Boessenecker, a professor at the College of Charleston and lead author of a study in the British Royal Society journal Proceedings B.

During those four million years - a brief interlude on the evolutionary clock - I. xenops lost its pearly whites, saw its snout and mouth shrink and developed super muscular lips.