Knighthood in the Order of Saint-Charles, received from H.S.H. the Prince Albert II of Monaco on 17 November 2009, for services rendered to the Principality in his quality of Chair of the Scientific Committee of the "Agreement on the Conservation of Cetaceans of the Black Sea, Mediterranean Sea and Contiguous Atlantic Area".
Other fossil cetaceans have also been found in the area, as well as a fish, a diverse invertebrate fauna that includes molluscs, gastropods, marine diatoms, and Antarctica’s first Pliocene decapod crustacean.
Elephant seals do not have a developed a system of echolocation in the manner of cetaceans, but their vibrissae, which are sensitive to vibrations, are assumed to play a role in search of food.
The sediments that have yielded Pelagiarctos have also yielded numerous other species of ocean-going vertebrates, including sharks (Isurus, Sphyrna, Carcharocles), turtles (Psephophorus), seabirds (Osteodontornis, Diomedea, Puffinus), Cetaceans (Prosqualodon, Aulophyseter, Parietobalaena) and other pinnipeds (Allodesmus, Neotherium).
Abbé Pierre Joseph Bonnaterre (1752, Aveyron – 20 September 1804, Saint-Geniez) was a French naturalist who contributed sections on cetaceans, mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and insects to the Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique.
Transporting seals is considered to be easier than transporting cetaceans, since seals are semiaquatic and able to tolerate long periods out of water, as long as they are kept cool and moist.
While a close relationship between these and ungulates was already proposed by Frank Evers Beddard in 1900, and is generally accepted today, cetaceans have diverged so radically from their ancestors' lifestyle as to confound analyses of fossils and perhaps even DNA.