Caperea

About Caperea

Caperea takes its name from the Latin for "to wrinkle", after the wrinkled ear bone of the type specimen. The animal is small — about six and a half metres — and combines features that belong to no single group: the arched jaw and long baleen of a right whale, a falcate dorsal fin that right whales do not have, and a ribcage of broad, flattened, overlapping ribs unlike anything else alive.

Its placement inside the otherwise fossil family Cetotheriidae, argued from cranial and earbone morphology in 2012–13, makes it the last survivor of a lineage that dominated the baleen whales through the Miocene. The species has essentially no commercial history and essentially no population data; it is known mainly from strandings on southern coastlines and from a small number of at-sea encounters.