It may be two years old at this point. But I still can't get over this very strange dolphin - perhaps the rarest animal of its kind. That's because it has thumbs.
Okay, so maybe it doesn't have thumbs like you and me have thumbs. But the dolphin did have hook-shaped flippers that resemble aquatic appendages. Researchers with the Pelagos Cetacean Research Institute discovered the dolphin on two different occasions off the coast of Greece. Alexandros Frantzis, the scientific coordinator and president of the Pelagos Cetacean Research Institute, spoke with Live Science at the time about the discovery.
The dolphin wasn't shunned for its strange flippers and enjoyed swimming with the pod.
"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," Frantzis told Live Science.
It was just one of 1,300 striped dolphins in the region. But this dolphin had an "expression of some rare and 'irregular' genes" that caused it to develop flipper thumbs.
Dolphin With Thumbs
Lisa Noelle Cooper, an associate professor of mammalian anatomy and neurobiology at the Northeast Ohio Medical University, also expressed surprise at the discovery. "I've never seen a flipper of a cetacean that had this shape," Cooper told Live Science in an email. "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."
