Garrison Ervan G, Morgan Gary S, McGrath Krista, Speller Camilla, Cherkinsky Alexander
Geology, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA.
New Mexico Museum of Natural History & Science, Albuquerque, NM, USA.
PeerJ. 2019 Feb 4;7:e6381. doi: 10.7717/peerj.6381. eCollection 2019.
The Atlantic gray whale () presents an interesting case study of climate related dispersal and extinction. While (limited) fossil records confirm its presence in the Atlantic up until the 18th Century, its abundance and distribution within the Eastern and Western basins are still not well understood. The discovery of presumed gray whale fossil remains from the Georgia Bight and the Atlantic coast of Florida, from the mid-1980s to late-2000s, provides a new opportunity to recover additional data regarding their chronology within the Western basin. Here, we apply accelerator mass spectrometry radiocarbon techniques to six fossil whale finds, identifying dates within marine isotope stage 3 (59-24 ka) and the late Holocene, ∼2,000 yr BP. We additionally confirm the taxonomic identification of two fossil bone samples as using collagen peptide mass fingerprinting (ZooMS). The obtained dates, when combined with a larger corpus of previously published Atlantic gray whale fossil dates, support the hypothesis for the decline of the Atlantic gray whale in the late Pleistocene and the late Holocene. These new data augment the findings of the Eastern Atlantic Basin and better incorporate the Western Atlantic Basin into a pan-ocean understanding for the species.
大西洋灰鲸（）呈现了一个与气候相关的扩散和灭绝的有趣案例研究。虽然（有限的）化石记录证实其在18世纪之前存在于大西洋，但对其在东西部海域的丰度和分布仍了解不足。20世纪80年代中期至21世纪末，在佐治亚湾和佛罗里达大西洋海岸发现了疑似灰鲸化石遗迹，这为获取有关它们在西部海域年代学的更多数据提供了新机会。在此，我们对六个化石鲸发现应用加速器质谱放射性碳技术，确定了海洋同位素阶段3（59 - 24 ka）和全新世晚期（约2000年前）内的年代。我们还使用胶原蛋白肽质量指纹识别（动物质谱分析法）确认了两个化石骨样本的分类鉴定为。获得的年代与大量先前发表的大西洋灰鲸化石年代相结合，支持了关于更新世晚期和全新世晚期大西洋灰鲸数量下降的假设。这些新数据补充了东大西洋海域的研究结果，并更好地将西大西洋海域纳入对该物种的泛大洋理解之中。
