20-million-year-old tusked sea cow is Central America's oldest marine mammal


GAINESVILLE, Fla. --- Steven Manchester didn't set out to discover Central America's oldest known marine mammal. He was hoping to find fossil plants.

Manchester, curator of paleobotany at the Florida Museum of Natural History, had left a group of vertebrate paleontologists uphill of the Panama Canal to do his own prospecting, clambering down onto the narrow, exposed shoreline to look for fossil leaves, petrified wood and mineralized fruits and nuts.

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