Livyatan melvillei is an extinct species of physeteroid whale, which lived during the Miocene epoch, approximately 12-13 million years ago.
Discovery[]
In November 2008, fossil remains of Livyatan melvillei were discovered in the sediments of Pisco formation at Cerro Colorado, 35 kilometres (22 mi) south-southwest of Ica, Peru.[2] The remains include a partially preserved skull with teeth and mandible.[2] Rotterdam Natural History Museum researcher Klaas Post stumbled across them on the final day of a field trip there in November 2008.[1] Post was part of an international team of researchers, led by Dr Christian de Muizon, director of the Natural History Museum in Paris, and included other palaeontologists from Utrecht University and the natural history museums of Rotterdam, Museo storia naturale di Pisa, the Museum of Natural History of the National University of San Marcos in Lima and Brussels.[3]
The fossils have been dated at 12–13 million years old and were prepared in Lima, Peru,[1] and are now part of the collection of the Natural History Museum there.
Etymology and nomenclature[]
Researchers originally assigned the English name of the biblical monster, Leviathan, to this prehistoric whale as Leviathan melvillei, dedicating the discovery to Herman Melville, author of Moby-Dick—the researchers behind the excavation of L. melvillei were all fans of this novel.[3] However, the scientific name Leviathan was a junior homonym of Leviathan Koch, 1841 for a genus of mastodon (see Leviathan in Wikispecies). Junior homonyms need to be replaced with new names, except under certain special circumstances (ICZN 1999 Article 60). In August 2010, the authors rectified this situation by coining a new genus name for the whale, Livyatan, from the original Hebrew spelling.