Photo: Alexandros Frantzis // Pelagos Cetacean Research Institute
Tremble in fear, humanity. In a turn of events foreshadowed by a classic Onion article, scientists have found a dolphin with what appears to be thumbs. The creature was spotted by researchers with the Pelagos Cetacean Research Institute on two occasions during boat surveys off the coast of Greece.
“It was the very first time we saw this surprising flipper morphology in 30 years of surveys in the open sea and also in studies while monitoring all the stranded dolphins along the coasts of Greece for 30 years,” Alexandros Frantzis, the scientific coordinator and president of the Pelagos Cetacean Research Institute, told Live Science. He also added that, despite the unusual appearance of its flippers, the dolphin seemed healthy and able to keep up with the other members of its pod.
Frantzis added that the flipper “does not look like illness at all,” but rather “the expression of some rare and ‘irregular’ genes” that arose due to interbreeding between dolphins in the region. Lisa Noelle Cooper, an associate professor of mammalian anatomy and neurobiology at the Northeast Ohio Medical University, supported the theory, telling Live Science that “Given that the defect is in both the left and right flippers, it is probably the result of an altered genetic program that sculpts the flipper during development as a calf.”
However, we don’t have to bow down to the ascendence of our new cetacean overlords just yet, as Cooper added that “The hook-shaped ‘thumb’ may have some bone inside of it, but it certainly isn’t mobile.”
That was a close one.
