Aquatic sloths (<i>Thalassocnus</i>) from the Miocene of Chile and the evolution of marine mammal herbivory in the Pacific Ocean

The evolution of marine mammals in South America includes unique and extinct lineages found nowhere else in the world, such as the walrus-convergent whale <i>Odobenocetops</i> and multiple aquatic sloth species belonging to the genus <i>Thalassocnus</i>. Aquatic sloths have been collected from Mio-Pliocene marine deposits in Peru and Chile, and terrestrial deposits in Argentina. In Chile, these occurrences range over 800 km across several basins from the Bahía Inglesa, Coquimbo, and Horcón formations. Here we report aquatic sloth material belonging to the species <i>Thalassocnus natans</i> from a new locality, Norte Bahía Caldera from the Bahía Inglesa Formation in the Atacama Region. We find multiple lines of evidence to support a late Miocene age for this material, which consists of a nearly complete skeleton, including cranial and postcranial remains and associated mandible and postcranial elements that represent the most complete <i>Thalassocnus</i> specimens reported yet from Chile. Based on this finding, we review the stratigraphic origin and geologic age of <i>Thalassocnus</i> species from the western coast of South America and determine that remains from the Upper Pliocene of central Chile represent the youngest known record of this genus to date. Our review also suggests that overlapping stratigraphic ranges for type material of <i>T. antiquus</i> with both <i>T. natans</i> and <i>T. littoralis</i> weakens the proposed argument for <i>Thalassocnus</i> evolution through anagenesis succession. Finally, in the context of <i>Thalassocnus</i> material from Chile and Peru, including other marine mammal herbivores (<i>e.g</i>., sirenians), we demonstrate that one of the most unusual features of this guild is that South American marine mammal herbivores did not reach the body sizes of their analogous counterparts (<i>i.e</i>., desmostylians and sirenians) in the North Pacific. This observation builds on other paleontological evidence about the unusual features of the Peruvian biotic province during the Neogene.