Correction: Evolutionary Patterns among Living and Fossil Kogiid Sperm Whales: Evidence from the Neogene of Central America

Kogiids are known by two living species, the pygmy and dwarf sperm whale (Kogia breviceps and K. sima). Both are relatively rare, and as their names suggest, they are closely related to the sperm whale, all being characterized by the presence of a spermaceti organ. However, this organ is much reduced in kogiids and may have become functionally different. Here we describe a fossil kogiid from the late Miocene of Panama and we explore the evolutionary history of the group with special attention to this evolutionary reduction. The fossil consists of cranial material from the late Tortonian (~7.5 Ma) Piña facies of the Chagres Formation in Panama. Detailed comparison with other fossil and extant kogiids and the results of a phylogenetic analysis place the Panamanian kogiid, herein named Nanokogia isthmia gen. et sp. nov., as a taxon most closely related to Praekogia cedrosensis from the Messinian (~6 Ma) of Baja California and to Kogia spp. Furthermore our results show that reduction of the spermaceti organ has occurred iteratively in kogiids, once in Thalassocetus antwerpiensis in the early-middle Miocene, and more recently in Kogia spp. Additionally, we estimate the divergence between extant species of Kogia at around the late Pliocene, later than previously predicted by molecular estimates. Finally, comparison of Nanokogia with the coeval Scaphokogia cochlearis from Peru shows that these two species display a greater morphological disparity between them than that observed between the extant members of the group. We hypothesize that this reflects differences in feeding ecologies of the two species, with Nanokogia being more similar to extant Kogia. Nanokogia shows that kogiids have been part of the Neotropical marine mammal communities at least since the late Miocene, and gives us insight into the evolutionary history and origins of one of the rarest groups of living whales. PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone. 0123909 April 29, 2015 1 / 29 OPEN ACCESS Citation: Velez-Juarbe J, Wood AR, De Gracia C, Hendy AJW (2015) Evolutionary Patterns among Living and Fossil Kogiid Sperm Whales: Evidence from the Neogene of Central America. PLoS ONE 10(4): e0123909. doi:10.1371/journal.pone. 0123909 Academic Editor: Laurent Viriot, Team 'Evo-Devo of Vertebrate Dentition', FRANCE Received: September 25, 2014 Accepted: February 23, 2015 Published: April 29, 2015 Copyright: © 2015 Velez-Juarbe et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: All relevant data are within the paper and its Supporting Information files. Funding: Funding for this project was provided by National Science Foundation Partnerships for International Research and Education grant #0966884 to JVJ, ARW, CDG, and AJWH; National Science Foundation Earth Sciences Postdoctoral Fellowship grant #1249920 to JVJ; and Secretaria Nacional de Ciencia, Tecnología en Innovación grant #APY-NI10-016A to CDG. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.