Move over Flipper, there’s a far more impressive dolphin in town – one with ‘thumbs’.
Researchers studying dolphins in the Gulf of Corinth off Greece spotted the curious creature in July, noting its flippers are shaped like mittens, with two hooks like thumbs.
However, they said the deformity does not appear to affect how the dolphin swims, eats or interacts with its pod.
In fact, it was seen ‘swimming, leaping, bow-riding and playing’ in the crystal blue waters, according to Dr Alexandros Frantzis, president of the Pelagos Cetacean Research Institute which carried out the study.
‘It was the very first time we saw this surprising flipper morphology in 30 years of surveys in the open sea and also in studies while monitoring all the stranded dolphins along the coasts of Greece for 30 years,’ said Dr Frantzis, speaking to Live Science.
The flipping fantastic animal is a striped dolphin, one of several species including common dolphins and Risso’s dolphins that live in the gulf – a sort of dolphin commune, if you will.
Dr Frantzis suggests the unusual flipper anatomy may be the ‘expression of some rare and “irregular” genes’ that cropped up due to constant interbreeding, rather than any kind of illness.
Interestingly, the bones in a dolphin’s flipper are not that different from those in the human hand, but while the long fingers bones in people are individually encased in tissue, in dolphins they are wrapped up all as one.
But while in this case the dolphin’s skin has formed unusually, there’s no chance the ‘thumb’ is really a flexible finger.
Lisa Noelle Cooper, an associate professor of mammalian anatomy and neurobiology at the Northeast Ohio Medical University, assessed the images and agreed the cause is likely genetic.
‘I’ve never seen a flipper of a cetacean [dolphins, porpoises, whales and narwhals] that had this shape,’ said Professor Cooper, speaking to Live Science. ‘Given that the defect is in both the left and right flippers, it is probably the result of an altered genetic program that sculpts the flipper during development as a calf.
‘It looks to me like the cells that normally would have formed the equivalent of our index and middle fingers died off in a strange event when the flipper was forming while the calf was still in the womb.
‘The hook-shaped ‘thumb’ may have some bone inside of it, but it certainly isn’t mobile.
‘No cetaceans have mobile thumbs’
She added: ‘It is lovely to see that this animal is thriving.’
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