Refuting Creationism - Holy Sea Cow! A 20-Million-Year-Old Fossil Dugong From Arabia!

An artistic reconstruction of a herd of ancient sea cows foraging on the seafloor

Alex Boersma

Fossils of Salwasiren qatarensis, a newly described 21-million-year-old ancient sea cow species found in Al Maszhabiya [AL mahz-HA-bee-yah], a fossil site in southwestern Qatar.

Photo by James Di Loreto, Smithsonian.

Ancient Manatee Relative Reveals That Sea Cows Have Engineered the Arabian Gulf’s Seagrass Ecosystems for Over 20 Million Years | Smithsonian Institution

Scientists from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, together with collaborators at Qatar Museums, have just announced the discovery of 20-million-year-old fossils of a sea cow that was a miniature version of living dugongs, and which almost certainly lived in the same seagrass meadows as modern dugongs.

The scientists have published their findings in the journal PeerJ.

If there is one thing that has creationists scraping the bottom of their barrel for reasons to dismiss evidence, it is news of fossils that are tens of millions of years older than they believe the universe is — simply because Bronze Age authors of their favourite source book, the Bible, said so.

In their determination to show the world that nothing can make them change their belief in the demonstrably absurd, creationists will resort to false accusations of lying against scientists, claim they are incompetent, or insist that they used dating methods they claim (incorrectly) to have been proven false, all in an attempt to preserve their beliefs. It is as though they imagine the entire global scientific community, and all the research institutions within it, exist solely to disprove the Bible in order to make creationists change their minds.

For rational people without such an egocentric view of the world, however, discoveries such as these miniature dugongs help to paint a fascinating picture of how species — and the ecosystems of which they are a part — have evolved over time. The fossils were found about 10 miles from a bay of seagrass that is prime habitat for modern dugongs.

Dugongs - Ecology & Evolution.

Dugongs are large, fully aquatic herbivorous mammals and represent one of the most distinctive evolutionary experiments among placental mammals. Their biology, fossil record, and relationships to other mammals are exceptionally well documented and leave little ambiguity about their evolutionary history.

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What dugongs are

The dugong (*Dugong dugon*) is the only living species in the family Dugongidae. Together with manatees, it belongs to the order Sirenia, a small group of marine mammals specialised for grazing on seagrass.

Key features include:

• A streamlined, spindle-shaped body
• Forelimbs modified into flippers
• No hind limbs (only internal vestiges remain)
• A horizontally flattened tail fluke
• Downturned snout adapted for uprooting seagrass

Dugongs inhabit warm, shallow coastal waters of the Indo-Pacific and are entirely dependent on seagrass ecosystems.

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Evolutionary origins Terrestrial ancestry
Sirenia evolved from four-limbed terrestrial mammals during the early Cenozoic, shortly after the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs. The earliest known sirenians, such as Prorastomus and Pezosiren (~50 million years old), were semi-aquatic animals that still walked on land.

The fossil record documents:

• Gradual reduction of hind limbs
• Increasing bone density (pachyosteosclerosis) for ballast
• Progressive adaptation of the skull and teeth for herbivory
• Transition from amphibious to fully aquatic life

This transition is as well documented as that of whales and shows no discontinuities.

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Relationship to other mammals Afrotherian connections

Dugongs are not closely related to whales or dolphins, despite superficial similarities. Instead, they belong to the placental mammal clade Afrotheria, which originated in Africa. Their closest living relatives are:

• Elephants
• Hyraxes

This relationship is supported by:

• Molecular genetics
• Shared anatomical traits (e.g. skull and tooth development)
• Details of placentation and embryology

The grouping of elephants, sirenians, and hyraxes is known as Paenungulata.

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Dugongs vs manatees

Although often confused, dugongs and manatees differ in several important ways:

Feature	Dugongs	Manatees
Tail	Fluked, whale-like	Paddle-shaped
Diet	Seagrass specialists	Seagrass + freshwater plants
Range	Indo-Pacific	Atlantic & Caribbean
Skull	Strongly downturned snout	Less specialised snout

Dugongs are more specialised grazers, which makes them ecologically important but also more vulnerable to habitat loss.

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Fossil diversity and extinct relatives

The modern dugong is the last survivor of a once-diverse lineage. Extinct dugongids include:

• Small-bodied coastal grazers
• Large open-water forms
• The gigantic Steller’s sea cow (Hydrodamalis gigas), hunted to extinction in the 18th century

Fossils show that sirenians once occupied a much broader range of ecological niches and geographic areas than they do today.

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Ecological significance

Dugongs act as ecosystem engineers:

• Grazing stimulates new seagrass growth
• Maintains meadow diversity
• Enhances nutrient cycling

Their evolutionary history is tightly bound to the evolution of seagrass ecosystems themselves, which expanded during the Cenozoic as coastal environments stabilised.

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Why dugongs matter to evolutionary biology

Dugongs provide:

• A clear example of land-to-sea evolutionary transition
• Strong evidence for descent with modification
• A textbook case of convergent evolution with whales (similar form, different ancestry)
• A powerful rebuttal to claims that complex marine mammals “appear suddenly”

Their anatomy, genetics, and fossil history are exactly what evolutionary theory predicts—and profoundly incompatible with creationist explanations.

News of the discovery, and its significance for understanding how dugongs are an essential part of the Arabian Gulf seagrass ecosystem, is summarised in a Smithsonian news release.

Ancient Manatee Relative Reveals That Sea Cows Have Engineered the Arabian Gulf’s Seagrass Ecosystems for Over 20 Million Years

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Smithsonian Researchers and Collaborators at Qatar Museums Describe a Sea Cow Bonebed in Qatar That Is Among the Richest Deposits of Marine Mammal Fossils in the World

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Today, the Arabian Gulf is home to manatee-like marine mammals called dugongs that shape the seafloor as they graze on seagrasses. A newly described fossil site in Qatar reveals that ancient sea cows engineered aquatic ecosystems in a similar way more than 20 million years ago.

In a paper published today in the journal PeerJ, researchers at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History worked with collaborators at Qatar Museums to also name a new species of sea cow that was a miniature version of living dugongs.

We discovered a distant relative of dugongs in rocks less than 10 miles away from a bay with seagrass meadows that make up their prime habitat today. This part of the world has been prime sea cow habitat for the past 21 million years—it’s just that the sea cow role has been occupied by different species over time.

Nicholas Pyenson, lead author
Department of Paleobiology
National Museum of Natural History
Smithsonian Institution
Washington, D.C., USA.

With a burly build and a downturned snout lined with sensitive bristles, dugongs (Dugong dugon) today resemble their relatives, manatees. The one key difference between these aquatic herbivores, which are often called sea cows, is their tails: a manatee’s tail is rounded like a paddle while a dugong’s fluked tail is more similar to that of a dolphin (however, dugongs and manatees are more closely related to elephants than they are to dolphins, whales and porpoises).

Dugongs inhabit coastal waters from western Africa through the Indo-Pacific and into northern Australia. The Arabian Gulf is home to the largest individual herd of dugongs in the world, where the sea cows serve as important ecosystem engineers. As they munch on seagrass, dugongs reshape the seafloor by creating feeding trails that release buried nutrients into the surrounding water for other aquatic animals and plants to use.

Fossils reveal that ancient dugong relatives have grazed on aquatic vegetation around the world for some 50 million years. However, their future in the Gulf is tenuous. The marine mammals are accidentally caught by local fishermen, and the coastal waters where they reside are impacted by pollution and development. The Gulf’s seagrass meadows that dugongs rely on are also affected by rising temperatures and salinity levels.

According to Ferhan Sakal, an archaeologist who is the head of excavation and site management at Qatar Museums and a coauthor of the new paper, key insights into the fate of dugongs and seagrasses in the Gulf are preserved in the region’s rocks.

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.

Ferhan Sakal, co-author
Department of Archaeology
Qatar Museums
Doha, Qatar.

Because delicate blades of seagrass rarely fossilize, researchers must glean insights into past marine ecosystems from the sturdier bones of ancient herbivores.

Few places preserve as many of these bones as Al Maszhabiya [AL mahz-HA-bee-yah], a fossil site in southwestern Qatar. The bonebed was initially discovered when geologists conducted mining and petroleum surveys in the 1970s and noted abundant “reptile” bones scattered across the desert. In the early 2000s, paleontologists returned to the area and quickly realized that the fossils were not from ancient reptiles but sea cows.

The area was called ‘dugong cemetery’ among the members of our authority, but at the time, we had no idea just how rich and vast the bonebed actually was.

Ferhan Sakal.

After receiving the necessary permits in 2023, Pyenson, Sakal and their colleagues conducted a survey of Al Maszhabiya’s fossils. Based on the surrounding rocks, the team dated the bonebed to the Early Miocene epoch around 21 million years ago. The team uncovered fossils that revealed that this area was once a shallow marine environment inhabited by sharks, barracuda-like fish, prehistoric dolphins and sea turtles.

These waters were also home to sea cows. The team identified more than 170 different locations containing sea cow fossils throughout the Al Maszhabiya site. According to Pyenson, this makes the bonebed the richest assemblage of fossilized sea cow bones in the world. Al Maszhabiya even rivals famed marine mammal deposits like Cerro Ballena, a site in Chile’s Atacama Desert where Pyenson and other researchers uncovered an ancient graveyard of stranded whales.

The fossilized bones at Al Maszhabiya resembled the skeletons of living dugongs. However, the ancient sea cows still possessed hind limb bones, which modern dugongs and manatees have lost through their evolution. The site’s prehistoric sea cows also had a straighter snout and smaller tusks than their living relatives.

The researchers described Al Maszhabiya’s fossil sea cows as a new species, Salwasiren qatarensis. The genus name “Salwasiren” references the Bay of Salwa, a nearby area of the Gulf where dugongs live. While the Bay of Salwa spans the waters of multiple countries, the team specifically honored the State of Qatar as the site where the new sea cow was found with the species name “qatarensis.”

It seemed only fitting to use the country’s name for the species as it clearly points to where the fossils were discovered.

Ferhan Sakal.

At an estimated 250 pounds, Salwasiren would have weighed as much as an adult panda or a heavyweight boxer, according to Pyenson. But it was still among the smaller sea cow species ever discovered. Some modern dugongs are nearly eight times heavier than Salwasiren.

Based on the fossils, the researchers posit that this region contained plentiful seagrass beds more than 20 million years ago, during a time in Earth’s history when the Gulf was a hotspot for biodiversity. Tending to these aquatic pastures were sea cows.

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.

Nicholas Pyenson.

And it is possible that Salwasiren was not the only species filling this role. According to Pyenson, sea cow fossils are often found grouped together among different species, making it plausible that the Al Maszhabiya bonebed could yield additional species of dugong relatives.

Sakal hopes that the ongoing collaboration between Qatar Museums and the Smithsonian will help lead to future discoveries at Al Maszhabiya and nearby sites. But the first step is protecting the area’s rich fossil heritage. Sakal and his colleagues are planning to nominate the area for protection as a UNESCO World Heritage site.

The most important part of our collaboration is ensuring that we provide the best possible protection and management for these sites, so we can preserve them for future generations

Ferhan Sakal.

Dugongs are an integral part of our heritage, not only as a living presence in our waters today, but also in the archaeological record that connects us to generations past. The findings at Al Maszhabiya remind us that this heritage is not confined to memory or tradition alone, but extends deep into geologic time, reinforcing the timeless relationship between our people and the natural world. In preserving and studying these remarkable creatures, we are also safeguarding a narrative that speaks to our nation’s identity, resilience and enduring connection to the sea.

Faisal Al Naimi, co-author.
Department of Archaeology
Qatar Museums
Doha, Qatar.

To preserve and make data from their research widely accessible, Pyenson and Sakal, in collaboration with the Smithsonian’s Digitization Program Office, digitally scanned several of the fossil sites they studied as well as the fossil skull, vertebrae, a tooth and other skeletal elements of the newly described ancient dugong species. Digital 3D models of the scans are available for the public to view and explore via the open-source Smithsonian Voyager platform, including interactive educational experiences about the research team’s findings and a 3D tour showing the fossil excavation process.

In addition to Pyenson and Sakal, the study includes authors affiliated with the Smithsonian’s Digitization Program Office; the Stone Ridge School of the Sacred Heart; Texas A&M University at Galveston; Texas A&M University, College Station; and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

Publication:

Pyenson ND, Sakal F, LeBlanc J, Blundell J, Klim KD, Marshall CD, Velez-Juarbe J, Wolfe K, Al-Naimi F. 2025.
High abundance of Early Miocene sea cows from Qatar shows repeated evolution of seagrass ecosystem engineers in Eastern Tethys. PeerJ 13: e20030 https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.20030

Abstract
Coastal ecosystems that include seagrasses are potential carbon sinks that require strategic conservation of top trophic consumers, such as dugongs, to maintain their function. It is unclear, however, how long seagrass ecosystems have persisted in geologic time because their fossil record is poor, although the record of their associated vertebrate consumers offers useful proxies. Here we describe an area of dense Early Miocene dugongid remains from Qatar. We documented over 172 sites in <1 km2 from one stratigraphic level, including material representing a new species of fossil dugongine dugongid. This taxon is unrelated to coeval Early Miocene dugongids from India and the Eastern Tethys and it is distantly related to extant dugongs, which occupy seagrass habitats of the Persian or Arabian Gulf (hereafter ‘Gulf’) today. The monodominant assemblage in this area likely reflects a single fossil dugongid taxon and matches the ecological diversity and geospatial distribution of modern-day live-dead assemblages in the Gulf. This fossil site from Qatar shows that the Gulf has repeatedly evolved sea cow communities with different taxa over the past 20 million years and coincides with an Early Miocene marine biodiversity hotspot in Arabia, prior to its eastward shift to the Indo-Australian Archipelago where dugongs continue to thrive today.

Introduction
Marine mammals play key roles in maintaining ocean health through their abundance as high-trophic level consumers or as keystone species (Hazen et al., 2024). In coastal ecosystems, seagrasses are major carbon sinks that have strong potential as natural climate solutions (Fourqurean et al., 2012). Notably, the species richness and abundance of seagrasses are maintained by marine vertebrates that forage in these communities, such as sea turtles (i.e., Chelonia mydas) and dugongs (i.e., Dugong dugon). These marine herbivores function as ecosystem engineers to create habitat while foraging on seagrasses. In particular, dugongs excavate feeding trails and pits that enhance nutrient availability and cycling (Coleman & Williams, 2002) through bioturbation generated by their feeding biomechanics (Marshall et al., 2003).

Today, dugongs range from Oceania through southern Asia to coastal Africa, but one of the largest aggregations occurs in the Gulf, along coastal habitats from Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates (Marshall et al., 2018; Khamis et al., 2023). While many of the details about the migration and size of this transboundary population remain unclear, Gulf dugongs number in the hundreds of individuals. Dugongs in the Gulf are also directly threatened by regional fisheries bycatch, coastal development, and desalination projects (Kawiyani et al., 2024.1), which along with climate change, pushes many organisms near their physiological limits during the summer in the Gulf (Kawiyani et al., 2024.1; Marshall et al., 2020). Forecasting the biological response of seagrass communities to future climate projections, especially in the Gulf (Al-Mudaffar Fawzi et al., 2022; Fieseler et al., 2023.1) will require comparable datasets from the geologic past. However, it is unclear how long marine herbivores have been ecological engineers in coastal communities (Steneck, Bellwood & Hay, 2017), especially given the terrestrial ancestries of sirenians in the early Cenozoic and sea turtles in the early-mid Mesozoic (Kelley & Pyenson, 2015). For sirenians in particular, their excellent fossil record shows an Eocene or Oligocene antiquity to this ecological role (Domning, 2018.1), but data supporting this argument are sparse.

Fossil seagrasses are rare and have low preservation potential (Beavington-Penney, Wright & Woelkerling, 2004), yet it has been proposed that the presence of these communities in the geologic past can be inferred by the fossil record of associated marine herbivores (Vélez-Juarbe, 2014). Fossil sea turtles with seagrass-shearing ecomorphologies have evolved repeatedly since the Cretaceous (Parham & Pyenson, 2010), indicating a large potential geologic interval for seagrass foraging; sea cows evolved from semiaquatic terrestrial ancestors in the Eocene, and became obligately aquatic by the late Eocene (Domning, 2018.1). How sirenians evolved underwater foraging to become ecosystem engineers remains unclear. Here we report a monodominant bonebed assemblage of fossil dugongids from the Early Miocene Dam Formation of Qatar. The abundance and geospatial distribution of these fossil dugongids, along with the phylogenetic analysis of the presumed monodominant taxon, suggest that this assemblage represents the first of several marine herbivore invasions of coastal ecosystems along the Arabian Peninsula in the past ∼20 million years, coinciding with a marine biodiversity hotspot that has migrated across Europe and Asia during the Cenozoic (Renema et al., 2008).

Figure 1: Geographic context of fossil dugongids from Qatar.
(A) The Gulf; (B) Qatar with fossil dugongid localities; (C) fossil dugongid localities in southwest Qatar; (D) fossil dugongid localities at Al Maszhabiya. Open white dots denote non-Miocene Cenozoic localities, dark blue dots are Dam Formation fossil dugongid localities except for light blue localities belonging to dugongids from the Lower Al-Kharrara Member. See Supplemental Information text for more details.

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Figure 2: Stratigraphic and taphonomic context of Al Maszhabiya bonebed. (A) Section of the Lower Al-Kharrara Member (L Al-K Mbr) of the Dam Formation and summary stratigraphy based on Cavelier (1970) and LeBlanc (2021) with the stratigraphic position of the Al Maszhabiya bonebed; M Al-K Mbr and U Al-K Mbr, Middle and Upper Al-Kharrara members, respectively; ms, mudstone; ss, sandstone; ls, limestone. Arrow denotes the bonebed. (B) Distribution of maximum rib thickness for 108 fossil dugongids. (C) Minimum number of individuals and (D) minimum number of elements based on fossil vertebrates, most of which are fossil dugongids (percentage and total near silhouette). Other vertebrates are (i) Odontoceti; (ii) Testudines; (iii) Carcharhiniformes; and (iv) Osteichthyes. See Supplemental Information text for more details.

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Figure 3: Salwasiren morphology using 3D photogrammetry of μCT of key skeletal elements.
(A–C) holotype cranium including left premaxilla, jugal, and partial braincase; (D–F) referred left incisor; (G–H) holotype left upper M2, in mesial and occlusal views, respectively; (I) holotype incomplete left mandible; (J–M) holotype lumbar, sacral, and caudal vertebrae in anterior views with left ilium (L) in lateral view; and (N–O) holotype right humerus. Abbreviations: a, acetabulum; ac, anterior cingulum; acv, anterior cingular valley; an, angular process; co, coronoid process; cc, coronoid canal; dc, deltoid crest; f, frontal; gt, greater tubercle; h, humeral head; it, ischial tuberosity; j, jugal; lt, lesser tubercle; mcl+hy, metaconule + hypocone; me, metacone; ns, neural spine; p, parietal; pa, paracone; pmx, premaxilla; pr, protocone; ptp, posttympanic process; so, supraoccipital; sop, supraorbital process; sq, squamosal; tp, transverse process; tr, trochlea; zp, zygomatic process.

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Figure 4: Time-calibrated strict consensus tree of Sirenia (180 MPTs of fit = 14.41). Pan-Sirenia, Trichechidae, and hydrodamalines are collapsed for ease of comparison; see full tree in Fig. S7. Ages and clade names follow Suárez et al. (2021.1) and Vélez-Juarbe & Wood (2018.2), respectively. Numbers at nodes indicate bootstrap values. Abbreviations: Pl, Pliocene; P, Pleistocene. Note that Dugong has a complex biogeographic history and can be coded as ranging across Eastern Tethys and Indo-Australian Archipelago, see Heritage & Seiffert (2022.1).

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Figure 5: Eastern Tethys paleogeography at 21 Ma. 1–3 on the globe shows successive jumping of biogeographic hotspots from Europe (Eocene, phase 1) to the Arabian Peninsula (Early Miocene, phase 2) to the Indo-Australian Archipelago (today, phase 3) following Renema et al. (2008) and others. Base map of Afro-Arabia and Eurasia modified from Straume et al. (2025) and Dill & Henjes-Kunst (2007). The establishment of the Gomphotherium landbridge occurred at 19 Ma (Rögl, 1999; Harzhauser et al., 2007.1).

Pyenson ND, Sakal F, LeBlanc J, Blundell J, Klim KD, Marshall CD, Velez-Juarbe J, Wolfe K, Al-Naimi F. 2025.
High abundance of Early Miocene sea cows from Qatar shows repeated evolution of seagrass ecosystem engineers in Eastern Tethys. PeerJ 13: e20030 https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.20030

Copyright: © 2025 The authors.
Published by PeerJ, Inc. Open access.
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)

Taken together, dugongs are a textbook example of how evolution works exactly as expected. Their anatomy, genetics, and exceptionally clear fossil record show a gradual transition from land-dwelling mammals to fully aquatic seagrass grazers, with no abrupt appearances and no need to invoke ad hoc explanations. Each stage in this transition is consistent with what is known about mammalian biology, biomechanics, and ecological adaptation.

Like whales, dolphins, and sea turtles, sirenians remain irretrievably tied to the surface because they retain a terrestrial respiratory system. They breathe air using lungs, not gills, and must surface regularly to survive. This is not the design one would expect of an organism purpose-built for permanent aquatic life, but it is exactly what evolution predicts when a lineage with a land-based ancestry becomes secondarily adapted to the sea.

Their close relationship to elephants and hyraxes is particularly instructive. Far from being an embarrassment to evolutionary theory, it is precisely the sort of unexpected but independently verifiable relationship that evolution predicts and creationism cannot account for. Molecular data, embryology, and comparative anatomy all converge on the same conclusion: dugongs are modified terrestrial mammals, not specially created marine anomalies.

As with so many discoveries in palaeontology, the problem here is not a lack of evidence but a refusal to accept it. Dugongs and their extinct relatives fit neatly into the broader picture of mammalian evolution and the history of Earth’s ecosystems. They add yet another line of evidence showing that life on this planet has changed over deep time, whether creationists like it or not.

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