A team of researchers from the Smithsonian Institution and Qatar Museums have just described the discovery of a sea cow bonebed in southwestern Qatar. The site, Al Maszhabiya, is huge and made up of more than 170 different spots where sea cow fossils have been found.
The site was originally discovered back in the 1970s by geologists during a survey for the mining and petroleum industry. Unsure about the identity of the bones scattered across the desert, these geologists made a note of abundant “reptile” bones and moved on.
It wasn’t until 30 years later, in the early 2000s, that palaeontologists returned to the remote area and identified the bones as belonging to sea cows.
“The area was called ‘dugong cemetery’ among the members of our authority,” says Ferhan Sakal, an archaeologist and head of excavation and site management at Qatar Museums. “But at the time, we had no idea just how rich and vast the bonebed actually was.”
The bonebed has been described as one of the richest deposits of marine mammal fossils in the world, rivalling the site of Cerro Ballena (or ‘Whale Hill’) in Chile’s Atacama Desert where more than 40 individual whale skeletons were found in 2011.
After receiving the necessary permits in 2023, Sakal and colleagues conducted a thorough survey of Al Maszhabiya and found the site dated to the Early Miocene, roughly 21 million years ago. They also discovered a new species of sea cow, which they named Salwasiren qatarenis, after the country where it was found.
The new species looks remarkably similar to the living dugongs that still inhabit seagrass meadows just 10 miles away from Al Maszhabiya, though researchers have noted a few key differences. The extinct species still possessed hind limb bones, which today’s sea cows have lost after millions of years of evolution. They were also smaller and had straighter snouts and shorter tusks than their living relatives.
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Alongside bones of seacows, researchers also discovered fossils of sharks, barracuda-like fish, prehistoric dolphins and sea turtles, suggesting this dry, barren patch of desert was once part of a shallow marine environment that supported a rich diversity of life.
According to Sakal, the rocks around Al Maszhabiya preserve a record of how such environments have changed over the last 21 million years, and thus provide some key insights into how they may change in the future.
“If we can learn from past records how the seagrass communities survived climate stress or other major disturbances like sea-level changes and salinity shifts, we might set goals for a better future of the Arabian Gulf,” he says.
As the delicate blades of seagrass rarely fossilise, researchers must rely on the fossilised bones of ancient herbivores such as Salwasiren qatarenis to piece together information about past environments.
Today, the Arabian Gulf is home to the largest individual herd of dugongs in the world, but their future in the region is uncertain. The seagrass meadows that line large parts of the Gulf are threatened by rising temperatures and salinity levels, as well as pollution and rapid industrial development in the region.
Dugongs feed almost exclusively on these seagrasses. In doing so, they release buried nutrients that benefit other plants and aquatic animals, making them ‘ecosystem engineers’ and critical to the overall health of the Gulf’s coastal waters.
According to Nicholas Pyenson, the curator of fossil marine mammals at the Smithsonian, Salwasiren qatarenis probably played a similar role.
“The density of the Al Maszhabiya bonebed gives us a big clue that Salwasiren played the role of a seagrass ecosystem engineer in the Early Miocene the way that dugongs do today. There’s been a full replacement of the evolutionary actors but not their ecological roles,” he says.
The findings from the study have been published in the journal PeerJ.
Top image: Nicholas Pyenson and Ferhan Sakal survey Al Maszhabiya with the fossil ribs of a 21-million-year-old sea cow in the foreground. Credit: Clare Fieseler
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