Don't tell Ahab: scientists find the real great white whale

Scientists on Wednesday said fossils unearthed in 1909 in
Santa Barbara, California, that had been wrongly
categorized for decades as belonging to a group of extinct
walruses were the remains of a fearsome sperm whale
that swam the Pacific Ocean 15 million years ago during
the Miocene Epoch.
They named it Albicetus, meaning "white whale," a
reference to the leviathan in Herman Melville's classic
1851 novel "Moby-Dick," centering on Captain Ahab's
obsession with a huge white sperm whale.
"Because the fossil specimen is a pale white color, and an
ancient sperm whale, it seemed appropriate to honor
Melville's infamous whale," said researcher Alex Boersma
of the Smithsonian Institution's Museum of Natural History
in Washington.
Albicetus (pronounced al-bee-SEE-tus) was around 20 feet
long (6 meters) and likely weighed about 5 tons. It was a
distant relative to today's sperm whales but smaller:
modern ones reach 60 feet (18 meters). Its large conical
teeth and its jaws were much more robustly built than
today's sperm whales, indicating Albicetus was more
vicious.
"The presence of large upper and lower teeth suggests
that Albicetus was likely hyper-carnivorous, meaning that
it fed primarily on other marine mammals such as smaller
whales and seals," Boersma said.
"I wouldn't have wanted to be a seal in the Miocene
oceans," added Nicholas Pyenson, the museum's curator of
fossil marine mammals.
This feeding style is uncommon among modern whales,
limited to killer whales. Modern sperm whales feed mainly
on squid.
"It was evident to us at first look that it was different from
any other fossil sperm whale we had seen, which meant
that it may hold the key to important tidbits about the
evolution of sperm whales," Boersma said.
The earliest-known sperm whale lived 25 million years
ago.
Sperm whales are known for their unique block-shaped
heads, which house what is known as the spermaceti
organ, thought to play a role in the generation of sound
used in finding prey. Albicetus' skull shape suggests its
spermaceti organ was much smaller, giving it a somewhat
less-bulbous forehead.
The bulky fossils of its skull, jaws and teeth were first
described in 1925 by Smithsonian paleontologist
Remington Kellogg but had not been carefully examined
since. Kellogg knew it was a sperm whale but unwittingly
gave it a scientific name, Ontocetus, covering a group of
walruses.