Four years ago Panamanian student Dioselina Vigil discovered a fossil in rocks near the small town of Piña. It turned out to be more than a bunch of bones. After careful preparation under the careful guidance of Smithsonian marine mammal paleobiologist Nicholas Pyenson and his team, the amazing fossil skull, replete with most of its teeth, was revealed to be a new genus of ‘river’ dolphin which we named Isthminia panamensis.
Isthminia, now an extinct lineage, is the closest relative of the Amazon river dolphins but was found in rocks that were deposited in open ocean just 6 million years ago. In this context the evolution of the river dolphins’ ecological shift from the sea to river becomes just a little clearer.
We are extremely proud that all aspects of the study are open-access. 3D models are available from the Smithsonian’s X 3D site for anyone to download, print and study. The paper itself is published in the open-access journal PeerJ. We even made all reviews available to read in this increasingly popular model for publication and divulgation. A 3D print of the specimen is on display at the Panama’s Biomuseo, and I even have a 3D print of the fossil in my lab.
Get the article here, play around with the 3D models and print out your own Isthminia panamensis
O'Dea Lab 
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