''Frisiphoca'' is an extinct genus of

phocid The earless seals, phocids or true seals are one of the three main groups of mammals within the seal lineage, Pinnipedia. All true seals are members of the family Phocidae (). They are sometimes called crawling seals to distinguish them from t ...

belonging to the subfamily

Phocinae Phocinae (known colloquially as "Northern seals") is a subfamily of Phocidae whose distribution is found in the seas surrounding the Holarctic, with the Baikal seal (''Pusa sibirica'') being the world's only freshwater species of pinniped. Wh ...

. It is known from fossils found in the late

Miocene The Miocene ( ) is the first geological epoch of the Neogene Period and extends from about (Ma). The Miocene was named by Scottish geologist Charles Lyell; the name comes from the Greek words (', "less") and (', "new") and means "less recent" ...

Belgium Belgium, ; french: Belgique ; german: Belgien officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a country in Northwestern Europe. The country is bordered by the Netherlands to the north, Germany to the east, Luxembourg to the southeast, France to ...

Taxonomy

There are two species of ''Frisiphoca'', ''F. aberratum'' and ''F. affine''. Both were previously assigned to ''Monotherium'',P. J. Van Beneden. 1876. Les phoques fossiles du bassin d'Anvers. Bulletins de l'Academie Royale des Sciences, des Lettres et des Beaux-Arts de Belgique 41:783-803 but Dewaele et al. (2018) found those species generically distinct from the ''Monotherium'' type species and placed them in their own genus, ''Frisiphoca''.

Fossils

Fossils of ''Frisiphoca aberratum'' and ''F. affine'' occur in the Tortonian-age Diest Formation of the vicinity of Antwerp, Belgium. Ray (1976) tentatively referred to ''F. aberratum'' a humerus from Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts.C. E. Ray. 1976. Phoca wymani and other Tertiary seals (Mammalia: Phocidae) described from the eastern seaboard of North America. Smithsonian Contributions to Paleobiology 28:1-33.

References

{{Taxonbar, from=Q52987100 Miocene pinnipeds Prehistoric carnivoran genera Phocines Tortonian extinctions Prehistoric pinnipeds of Europe Fossil taxa described in 2018