New whale species discovered in Hokkaido

An illustration of the newly identified right whale species, named ‘Megabalaena sapporoensis’. Photo: Courtesy of the Sapporo Museum Activity Center

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 nine 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.

Megabalaena sapporoensis was determined as a new species also due to its distinguishing bone shapes.

Because no right whale fossils dating back 16 million to six million years had been excavated, the latest discovery will greatly contribute to solving the mystery of the whale family’s evolution, the team hopes.

The perfectly preserved bones “can fill in the major gap” in the fossil record, said Yoshihiro Tanaka, a curator at the center and the lead author of the study.

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