Phoberodon was described in 1926 from a partially complete skeleton with skull (holotype MLP 5-4) lacking the earbones, which was found in the ColhuehuapianGaiman Formation of Chubut Province, Argentina.[1] Subsequent authors either followed Cabrera (1926) in classifying Phoberodon as a squalodontid, or considered it a relative of Waipatia although the genus was included in any cladistic analysis of archaic odontocetes.[2][3][4][5] However, known specimens lack a periotic, which incorporates most defining synapomorphies of Squalodontidae, and Viglino et al. (2018) recovered Phoberodon as distantly related to Squalodon.[6]
References
^A. Cabrera. 1926. Cetaceos fossiles del Museo de La Plata. Revista del Museo de La Plata 29:363-411
^Simpson GG. 1945. The principles of classification and a classification of mammals. Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 85: 1–350
^Fordyce RE. 1994. Waipatia maerewhenua, new genus and new species (Waipatiidae, new family), an archaic Late Oligocene dolphin (Cetacea: Odontoceti: Platanistoidea) from New Zealand. Proceedings of the San Diego Museum of Natural History 29: 147–176.
^C. Muizon. 1994. Are the squalodonts related to the platanistoids?. Proceedings of the San Diego Society of Natural History 29:135-146
^Mariana Viglino, Mónica R Buono, R Ewan Fordyce, José I Cuitiño, Erich M G Fitzgerald, 2018. Anatomy and phylogeny of the large shark-toothed dolphin Phoberodon arctirostris Cabrera, 1926 (Cetacea: Odontoceti) from the early Miocene of Patagonia (Argentina). Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society zly053, https://doi.org/10.1093/zoolinnean/zly053