Ammon News - 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 shark-like snout, however, this oddball of the ocean was nasty, mean and built to hunt.

“It was, let’s say, deceptively cute,” said Erich Fitzgerald, senior curator of vertebrate paleontology at Museums Victoria Research Institute, and one of the paper’s authors.

“It might have looked for all the world like some weird kind of mash-up between a whale, a seal and a Pokémon but they were very much their own thing.”

The rare discovery of the partial skull, including ear bones and teeth, was made in 2019 on a fossil-rich stretch of coast along Australia’s Victoria state.

Jan Juc Beach, a cradle for some of the weirdest whales in history, is becoming a hotspot for understanding early whale evolution, Fitzgerald said. NYP