New Whale Species Discovered in Hokkaido

Newsfrom Japan

Society

Sep 22, 2025 14:32 (JST)

Tokyo, Sept. 22 (Jiji Press)–Fossils found in Hokkaido more than a decade ago have recently been identified as belonging to a new right whale species.

The fossil bones were first discovered by a citizen of Sapporo along the Toyohira River in the capital of the northernmost Japan prefecture in October 2008, leading to a Sapporo Museum Activity Center team’s years of work to unearth a nearly complete skeleton.

“Scrutiny soon revealed the skeleton belonged to a new type of whale,” according to a research article published in Palaeontologia Electronica, a British academic journal, earlier this month.

The team called the whale “Megabalaena sapporoensis,” or “big right whale of Sapporo.”

They further found that the bones, including vertebrae and phalanges, were about 9 million years old and that the whale in the family Balaenidae, or right whales, which is believed to have existed in the Late Miocene, was approximately 13 meters long, larger than its most recent ancestors but smaller than distant ones.

[Copyright The Jiji Press, Ltd.]

Jiji Press