Long Beaked Common Dolphin - Dolphins And Whales Window
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Long Beaked Common Dolphin
Differentiating species:
Despite the historic practice of lumping the entire Delpinus genus into a
single species, these widely distributed dolphins exhibit a wide variety of
size, shape and colour. Indeed over the past few decades over 20 distinct
species in the genus have been proposed. Scientists in California in the 1960s
concluded that there were two species - the long-beaked and short-beaked.
This analysis was essentially confirmed by a more in-depth genetic study in
the 1990s. This study also suggested that a third species (D. tropicalis,
common name usually Arabian Common Dolphin), characterized by an extremely
long and thin beak and found in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean, might be distinguished
from the long-beaked species. The current standard taxonomic works recognise
this as just a regional variety.
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