Researchers are looking into a dolphin born with hook-shaped flippers being described as “thumbs” that was photographed in the waters of Corinth, Greece.
The photos of the dolphin may have just gone viral online, but researchers with the Pelagos Cetacean Research Institute spotted the aquatic mammal twice this summer.
Alexandros Frantzis, the president of the institute, spoke with LiveScience about the thumbed dolphin, sharing that while it may have different fins, it’s no different from others.
Frantzis says the dolphin has been observed “swimming, leaping, bow-riding, playing” without issue.
“It was the very first time we saw this surprising flipper morphology in 30 years of surveys in the open sea and also in studies while monitoring all the stranded dolphins along the coasts of Greece for 30 years,” Frantzis said.
While they aren’t entirely certain what caused the dolphin to have thumb-like fins, scientists don’t believe it was caused by any illness, Frantzis told USA Today.
“The fact that this irregularity is found in both flippers of the dolphin and no injuries or skin lesions are present explains why this could not be an illness, but an expression of very rare genes,” Frantzis said.
The dolphins in the Gulf of Corinth are a unique tribe, being that the waters they inhabit are the only place where striped dolphins live in a semi-enclosed gulf, according to the institute.
This, in turn, has created a genetic distance from the dolphins in the gulf to others in the world, according to the institute.
The dolphins, which have been isolated from larger seas, have been under study by the researchers since 1995.