Diaphorocetus is an extinct genus of odontocete cetacean belonging to Physeteroidea. Its remains were found in the Monte León Formation of Argentina, dating to the Miocene.[ Diaphorocetus at Fossilworks.org]
Systematics
Diaphorocetus was originally named
Mesocetus by Moreno (1892).
[Moreno, F. P. 1892. Lijeros apuntes sobre dos generos de cetaceos fosiles de la Republica Argentina. Revista de la Museo La Plata 3, 393–400.] Lydekker (1893) found that
Mesocetus was already in use for an extinct mysticete, so he renamed the sperm whale
Hypocetus.
[Lydekker, R. 1893 1894. Cetacean skulls from Patagonia. Anales del Museo de la Plata 2: 1–13.] Ameghino (1894) too recognized Moreno's name as preoccupied, but unaware of Lydekker's paper, coined his own replacement name
Diaphorocetus for
Mesocetus.
[Ameghino, F. 1894. Enum�eration synoptique des especes de mammiferes fossiles des formations �eocenes de Patagonie. Boletin de la Academia Nacional de Ciencias en C�ordoba 13: 259–455] Diaphorocetus was declared a
nomen protectum (protected name) by Paolucci et al. (2019) because
Hypocetus and
Paracetus have not been used as valid since 1899 under Article 23.9 of the Code.
[Florencia Paolucci, Mónica R. Buono, Marta S. Fernández, Felix G. Marx & José I. Cuitiño (2019). Diaphorocetus �poucheti (Cetacea, Odontoceti, Physeteroidea) from Patagonia, Argentina: one of the earliest sperm whales, Journal of Systematic Palaeontology, DOI:10.1080/14772019.2019.1605544]
Paleobiology
The small teeth of
Diaphorocetus and the bottleneck-like nature of the rostrum suggest that
Diaphorocetus employed a feeding strategy intermediate between that of raptorial sperm whales like
Acrophyseter and
Livyatan and extant sperm whales.
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