A humpback whale mother and baby swim off the island of Maui in Hawaii. Humpbacks are baleen whales like the new fossil species found in New Zealand.
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Prehistoric Toothless Whale Among Oldest of Its Kind
Fossils unearthed in New Zealand belonged to an ancestor of minkes and humpbacks that lived about 27.5 million years ago.
A fossil found on the South Island of New Zealand is now one of the earliest members of the filter-feeding family of behemoths known as baleen whales. Modern baleen whales include many of the world’s largest cetaceans, such as blue, fin, humpback, right, bowhead, and minke whales.
The new species has been named Toipahautea waitaki, which roughly translates to the Māori for "baleen origin whale of the Waitaki region." It dates back 27.5 million years, say the authors of a study describing it in the journal Royal Society Open Science. At this time in the mid-Oligocene epoch, the region was an island archipelago lapped by the shallow waters of highly productive seas.
The very ancient ancestors of modern whales and
