Fossil-hunters have found the remains of a creature they’re calling Melville’s Leviathan, AP reports. It’s a whale that, 12 million years ago, snacked on humpbacks the way orcas eat seals:
The prehistoric sperm whale grew to between 13 and 18 meters (up to 60 feet) long, not unusual by today’s standards. But unlike modern sperm whales, Leviathan melvillei, named for Herman Melville, sported vicious, tusk-like teeth some 36 centimeters (14 inches) long.
The ancient beast evidently dined on other whales, researchers said in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature. They report finding a skull of the beast in a Peruvian desert.
The researchers named it in tribute to the 19th-century author and his classic tale of the great white whale, which includes frequent digressions on natural history that punctuate the action.
“There is a chapter about fossils,” one of the paper’s authors, Olivier Lambert of the Natural History Museum in Paris, said. “Melville even mentions some of the fossils that I studied for my PhD thesis.”
There’s an illustration at the link.