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Thursday, July 1, 2010

Moby Dick Meets Jaws - Science News

Moby Dick Meets Jaws - Science News: "What would you get if you crossed a whale with a shark? Maybe something like Leviathan melvillei, a long-extinct, hypercarnivorous whale with teeth longer than any T. rex ever had.

L. melvillei — a newly described sperm whale named to honor Herman Melville, author of the whaling novel Moby-Dick — lived between 12 million and 13 million years ago, says Olivier Lambert, a vertebrate paleontologist at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris. The aptly named leviathan is known only from remains of a jawbone and skull, which is about 75 percent complete, Lambert and his colleagues note in the July 1 Nature."

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