A Review of Cetacean Fossils from the Holocene Gulf of Ayutthaya
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Abstract
Cetacean fossils from the Thai Lower Central Plains, or what was once the paleo-Gulf of Ayutthaya during the Holocene maximum transgression, despite their potential in the study of sea-level oscillations and their vast discoveries in the past centuries, have only been infrequently reported and lacked compilations, preventing insights into these past Cetacean faunas from being studied in the scientific field. Accordingly, this research aims to review the records of Cetacean fossils from the Holocene Gulf of Ayutthaya, experimentally retrace historical sea level transgressions using these fossils, and lastly, due to the diverse Cetacean record, to compare Holocene Cetacean faunas with present-day faunas of the Gulf of Thailand. Results showed that a total of 17 Cetacean fossil sites had been identified from the Thai Lower Central Plains, all being found in the Bangkok Clay Formation and dating from 1,000 to 6,000 YBP. The most abundant species found was Balaenoptera edeni (n = 7), out of the seven taxa discovered, and a specimen from Bang Khun Thian District, Bangkok is preliminarily reidentified as Ziphius cf. cavirostris, posing a new record of the genus in the Gulf of Thailand. Moreover, these Cetacean fossil localities also allow for an interpretation of the paleo-shoreline, being in line with previous research using different indicators, further solidifying the vast extent of the Holocene Gulf of Ayutthaya. Lastly, almost all of the Cetacean faunas identified are still present in the present-day Gulf of Thailand presenting the possibility that the faunas of the Gulf of Thailand could be descendants of the original population in the paleo-Gulf of Ayutthaya.
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Copyright © 2008 Department of Geology, Faculty of Science, Chulalongkorn University. Parts of an article can be photocopied or reproduced without prior written permission from the author(s), but due acknowledgments should be stated or cited accordingly.
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