Platanista gangetica
The Ganges river dolphin is a freshwater dolphin in the family Platanistidae. It lives in the Ganges and related rivers of South Asia, namely in the countries of India, Nepal, and Bangladesh. It is also known by the names susu and shihu in Assam shushuk in West Bengal and Bangladesh and Uttum in Chittagong region.
Kukil Gogoi · CC BY-SA 4.0 · via Wikipedia/Commons. May be a photograph of a specimen, or an artist’s reconstruction — an interpretation of a skeleton, since colour and soft tissue are almost never preserved.
On record
Recorded, not inferred- Sits inside
- PlatanistaPBDB
- Diet
- piscivorePBDB, for Platanista
- Life habit
- aquaticPBDB, for Platanista
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Cetacea
- Environment
- freshwaterPBDB, for Platanista
Time the record covers
At most 12 thousand years on record.
Every occurrence read is dated to somewhere between 11.7 ka and 0 Mya, and nothing in the dating separates them, so that window is what the record shows rather than a span.
4 occurrences of Platanista gangetica on record, most of them in the Holocene. The Paleobiology Database records this as a living group. Bar height is expected occurrences, not a count: each fossil is spread across the span it is dated to, so a tall narrow bar means tight dating and a low wide one means loose.
When
4 occurrences- Holocene100%
These are dates about fossils, not the animal: the record can only begin after it arose and end before it died out, so either end may reach further. Shares are expected occurrences: a fossil dated to a span is counted partly in each period it straddles. More on what this infers.
Platanista gangetica and its relatives
HoloceneWhere Platanista gangetica and its relatives were recorded in the Holocene.
Found in the same rock
1 taxon- Orcaella brevirostris1 site
The Paleobiology Database records 4 sites for Platanista gangetica, and this reads all of them. The number is how many of those sites it was catalogued from too.
This is not a list of everything alive at the time. It is only what has come out of the same ground as this animal and been written down.
Entered from
3 references- Indus dolphin population in the Punjab2
- Abundance of Irrawaddy dolphins (Orcaella brevirostris) and Ganges River dolphin (Platanista gangetica gangetica) estimated using concurrent counts made by independent teams in waterways of the Sundarabans Mangrove Forest in Bangladesh1
- Catalog of Living Whales1
Each of the 4 occurrences read was entered from one of these publications, ordered by how many each accounts for. This is not a search for papers mentioning the name. Entries link to doi.org where the Paleobiology Database holds an identifier, and to its own record where it does not. Relayed as the Paleobiology Database holds them, not checked against what they resolve to.
Media and terms
Media content1
Picture of Platanista gangetica
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Kukil Gogoi
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 4.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Platanista gangetica was found in Sketchfab.
Smithsonian Open Access and MorphoSource were not reached for this taxon, so this list is what the others held rather than everything there is.
The description on this site
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 4.0
This is what the site found, which is not the same as what exists.
Keep going
What may have been alongside itPlatanista through timeFormations of the HoloceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. (Leebeck 1801)