An undated artists rendering released Wednesday, April 22, 2009 by the Canadian Museum of Nature shows a line drawing of the skeleton and outline of the Puijila darwini, an otter-like fossil that was found on Devon Island in the Canadian Arctic.[Agencies]

One expert called it "a fantastic discovery" that fills a crucial gap in the fossil record.

The 23 million-year-old creature was not a direct ancestor of today's seals, sea lions and walruses, a group known collectively as pinnipeds. It's from a different branch. But it does show what an early direct ancestor looked like, said researcher Natalia Rybczynski.

The fossil was found on Devon Island in the Canadian Arctic, bolstering the notion that the far north was an early center of pinniped evolution, she said.

Rybczynski, a researcher at the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa, and colleagues from the United States report the find in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.

They named the creature Puijila darwini ("pew-YEE-lah dar-WIN-eye"). That combines an Inuit word for "young sea mammal," often a seal, with an homage to Charles Darwin. The famed naturalist had written that a land animal "by occasionally hunting for food in shallow water, then in streams or lakes, might at last be converted into an animal so thoroughly aquatic as to brave the open ocean."

Scientists already knew that pinnipeds evolved from land animals. But the earliest known fossil from that group already had flippers. So Puijila shows an earlier stage of evolution, the researchers said.

Puijila measured about three feet from its snout to the tip of its long tail. It resembled a river otter but had a short snout, large eyes and a thinner tail, Rybczynski said. It could hunt on land or in water, where it was apparently "a pretty darned good swimmer," she said.

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