20-million-year-old tusked sea cow is 'oldest'

[Still Waters]

Steven Manchester didn't set out to discover Central America's oldest known marine mammal. He was hoping to find fossil plants.

Manchester, curator of paleobotany at the Florida Museum of Natural History, had left a group of vertebrate paleontologists uphill of the Panama Canal to do his own prospecting, clambering down onto the narrow, exposed shoreline to look for fossil leaves, petrified wood and mineralized fruits and nuts.

It was a dangerous place to be: The rolling wake from passing ships could sweep a person off shore and into the canal. Manchester noticed that people were occasionally shouting at him through megaphones as they cruised past, but not understanding Spanish, he continued to comb the shore when he spotted bone.

https://phys.org/news/2019-02-million-year-old-tusked-sea-cow-central.html