No abstract

Fossil dolphins belonging to the extinct family Kentriodontidae are small to medium‐sized toothed cetaceans, which probably include the ancestors of some living species. Kentriodontids are known from rocks of Late Oligocene to Late Miocene age in various parts of the world. Among kentriodontids, species in the subfamily Kentriodontinae (e.g. species of Kentriodon Kellogg, 1927) are the most ubiquitous and generalized; these are now known from latest Oligocene to earliest Miocene strata in New Zealand and Patagonia, and Middle Miocene deposits in Maryland, Virginia, California and Japan. The diversity, morphologies and distributions of Miocene species of Kentriodontinae seem to parallel those of the living species of mostly pelagic delphinids in the subfamily Delphininae, and the fossil group may have been an ecological or behavioral/functional counterpart of the latter. Kentriodontines are inferred to have been wide‐ranging neritic to pelagic animals that ate small fish and other nectonic organisms; they were probably active echolocators, and might have formed large schools. They are relatively common as fossils and, therefore, are potentially useful for intercontinental correlations of marine deposits.

The use of skeletal oxygen isotopic records for use in paleotemperature reconstruction has been hampered by the lack of independent evidence for ocean water oxygen isotopic composition. The δ18O record from homeothermic cetaceans has provided an independent estimate of ocean δ18O values represented by the Calvert and Choptank formations of Maryland. Fish teeth and bones (especially shark and ray teeth) were also collected from these sediments and provide the basis for paleotemperature estimates for represented time slices of the middle Miocene. Trends in δ18O values of the fish phosphate throughout the Calvert Formation are of opposite polarity to the trends from the cetacean bone phosphate. Paleotemperatures calculated using the cetacean proxies for ocean δ18O values sharpen the already present trend, indicating that ocean temperatures increased during episodes of greater glaciation and decreased during periods of lesser or no glaciation. When using modern average ocean values of 0‰ SMOW in the paleotemperature calculation, however, corrected paleotemperatures for the Choptank Formation do not alter the existing pattern of temperatures.

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