Pinniped High levels of organic chemicals accumulate in these animals since they are near the top of food chains and have large reserves of blubber. Lactating mothers can pass the toxins on to their young. These pollutants can cause gastrointestinal cancers, decreased reproductivity and greater vulnerability to infectious diseases. Other man-made threats include habitat destruction by oil and gas exploitation, encroachment by boats, and underwater noise. Pinniped Pinnipeds, commonly known as seals, are a widely distributed and diverse clade of carnivorous, fin-footed, semiaquatic marine mammals. They comprise the extant families Odobenidae (whose only living member is the walrus), Otariidae (the eared
Saint Bathans mammal It was part of an assemblage of fossils recovered in Saint Bathans in 1978, in what would later be understood to be the Bannockburn Formation (Manuherikia Group), and first described in 2006. Like most small mammal fossils, the Saint Bathans mammal material is rather incomplete, with only a lower jaw fragment and femur being known. The lower jaw is toothless, though the presence of deep tooth sockets suggests that it was toothed in life and that the teeth were lost post-mortem. It bears a long fused mandibular symphysis, an evidently procumbent lower incisor, and five additional sockets that imply a