Spectacled porpoise Phocoena dioptrica Lahille, 1912

Abstract

Lahille (1912) first described this porpoise as Phocaena dioptrica from a pregnant female collected by Jose de Gaetano that had stranded alive at Punta Colares, south of Buenos Aires, Argentina. The skeleton of the adult now appears to be lost (Brownell, 1975), but the associated fetus is preserved in alcohol (specimen number MACN 12–14) at the Museo Argentino de Ciencias Naturales (Varela et al., 2010). The only junior synonym for this species is Phocoena storni (Marelli, 1922), that was based upon a cranium found on Tierra del Fuego and later shown to be P. dioptrica (Norris & McFarland, 1958). Several authors (Allen, 1925; Donoso-Barros, 1975; Hershkovitz, 1966) have suggested that the oddly colored cetacean from Chile, Phocaena obtusata Philippi, 1893 was a senior synonym and should thus replace dioptrica. True (1903) and Brownell (1975) disagreed, and Goodall et al. (1988) have demonstrated that P. obtusata is a specimen of Cephalorhynchus (probably C. eutropia) and the type location is Bahia de Talcahuano, Concepion, Chile, in the northern range of C. eutropia (Philippi, 1893).