The dilemma of trade samples and the importance of museum vouchers—caveats from a study on the extinction of Steller's sea cow: a comment on Crerar et al. (2014)

New data from the first discovered paleoparadoxiid (Desmostylia) specimen shed light into the morphological variation of the genus Neoparadoxia

“…Lastly, like other marine mammal lineages, desmostylian body sizes reached their maximum body size late in their evolutionary history 54 . By the middle to late Miocene, desmostylians were the largest herbivorous marine mammals along the North Pacific coastlines 54 , although they likely competed ecologically with co-occurring sirenians, which later eclipsed desmostylians in body size and survived until historical times in the North Pacific Ocean 55 . Specifically, in the “Topanga” Formation of Orange County, desmostylians co-occurred with sirenians such as Metaxytherium arctodites 56 , an ecological association that likely was repeated elsewhere in the mid-Miocene of California (e.g., coeval deposits of the Round Mountain Silt).…”

What do we know about the fossil record of pinnipeds? A historiographical investigation

“…deposit fossil specimens in accessible natural history collections such as museums or research institutions; avoid studying specimens derived from illegal or informal trade, as well as those collected outside of established natural history museums). Surprisingly, many of these problems still occur among marine mammal researchers in the twenty-first century (see [95,96,97]).…”

Serendipity in research—investigation into illegal wildlife trade discovers a new population of Steller's sea cows: a reply to Pyenson et al. (2016)

“…Pyenson et al [5] stated that studies of this type should be conducted using museum voucher specimens. However, the bones were not collected as part of a typical palaeontological study, but as the by-product of a very different kind of study (unpublished).…”