A rare ancient 25-million-year-old fossil was found on an Australian beach. Before whales there were majestic, gentle giants, some of their prehistoric ancestors were tiny, weird, and fear. They officially named the fossil found Janjucetus dullardi. It was small enough to fit in a single bed which obviously today’s whales can’t. The creature also had bulging eyes as tennis balls. Its teeth were fiendish, and they had a shark like snout. Additionally, it was nasty, mean, and built to hunt.
“It was deceptively cute” said Erich Fitsgerald, senior curator of vertebrate paleontology at Museums Victoria Research Institute. He also said, “It might have looked for all the world like some kind of mash-up between a whale, a seal and a Pokémon but they were very much their own thing.” This quote is where I got the inspiration for the title.
Jan Juc Beach in Australia, where the Janjucetus dullardi’s partial head, teeth, and ear fossils were found is becoming a hotspot for understanding whale evolution. The Janjucetus dullardi is only the fourth species ever identified from a group known as mammalodontids, early whales that lived only during the Oligocene Epoch. This was about 34 million to 23 million years ago.
The tiny monsters are thought to have grown about 3 meters in length and were an early branch of whales such as humpbacks, blues, and mikes. Although they had similar powerful jaws as modern whales they would have looked very different. “They may have had tiny little nubbins of legs just projecting as stumps from the wall of the body” says Fitsgerald.
Although the entirety of the skeletal was not found the partial skull and the other tiny bits and pieces found were an astonishing discovery, “It’s literally been the greatest 24 hours of my life!” said Ross Dullars, who discovered the skull while hunting at Jan Juc Beach.
