Tamanend's bottlenose dolphin

Tamanend's bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops erebennus) is a bottlenose dolphin of the coastal waters of the eastern United States, found in bays and estuaries from New York to Florida and related to coastal populations in the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico. Edward Drinker Cope first described it in 1865 from a specimen taken in a seine net at Red Bank in West Deptford Township, New Jersey, but the name was later merged into the common bottlenose dolphin. In 2022 Costa and colleagues compared morphology and mitochondrial and nuclear DNA of the nearshore and offshore ecotypes of the western North Atlantic and found them divergent, so the nearshore type was restored as its own species, accepted by the Society for Marine Mammalogy in 2023. The common name honours Tamanend, a chief of the Turtle Clan of the Lenni-Lenape, chosen in consultation with the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape Tribal Nation.