Long before whales were majestic, gentle giants, some of their prehistoric ancestors were tiny, weird, and feral. 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, reports the AP. "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. Few family trees seem stranger than that of Janjucetus dullardi, only the fourth species ever identified from a group known as mammalodontids, early whales that lived only during the Oligocene Epoch, about 34 million to 23 million years ago. That marked the point about halfway through the known history of whales.
The tiny predators, thought to have grown to 10 feet in length, were an early branch on the line that led to today's great baleen whales, such as humpbacks, blues, and minkes. Janjucetus dullardi was named by researchers after an amateur fossil hunter who doesn't mind its looks in the slightest. "It's literally been the greatest 24 hours of my life," said Ross Dullard, who discovered the skull at Jan Juc Beach.
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After Wednesday's confirmation of the new species, the school principal walked like a rock star onto campus with "high fives coming left, right and center," he said. Dullard plans a fossil party this weekend, featuring cetacean-themed games and whale-shaped treats in jello, to celebrate his nightmare Muppet find, finally confirmed. "That's taken my concentration for six years," he said. "I've had sleepless nights. I've dreamt about this whale."
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