The 25 million-year-old fossil shows a cartoonish creature with bulging eyes the size of tennis balls
Long before whales were majestic, gentle giants, some of their prehistoric ancestors were tiny, weird and feral. A chance discovery of a 25 million-year-old fossil on an Australian beach has allowed paleontologists to identify a rare, entirely new species that could unlock mysteries of whale evolution.
Researchers this week officially named Janjucetus dullardi, a cartoonish creature with bulging eyes the size of tennis balls, in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society. Unlike today’s whales, the juvenile specimen was small enough to fit in a single bed.
Boasting fiendish teeth and a sharklike snout, however, this oddball of the ocean was nasty, mean and built to hunt.
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