Indopacetus

About Indopacetus

The genus rests on a single species, and for most of its history on almost no material. A skull found on a Queensland beach in 1882 was described in 1926; a second, from Somalia, turned up in 1955. Nothing else was confidently referred to the species for decades, and it had a reputation as the least known large mammal in the world.

Unidentified tropical beaked whales had meanwhile been sighted repeatedly in the Indian and Pacific Oceans without anyone being able to name them. Genetic work on a series of strandings published in 2003 matched those animals to the two old skulls and gave the species a living identity at last. It is now known to be a wide-ranging animal of warm Indo-Pacific waters that travels in unusually large groups for a beaked whale.