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Livyatan is an extinct genus of macroraptorial sperm whale containing one known species: L. melvillei. The genus name was inspired by the biblical sea monster Leviathan, and the species name by Herman Melville, the author of the famous novel Moby-Dick about a white bull sperm whale. Herman Melville often referred to whales as "Leviathans" in ...
Macroraptorial sperm whales were highly predatory whales of the sperm whale superfamily (Physeteroidea) of the Miocene epoch that hunted large marine mammals, including other whales, using their large teeth. They consist of five genera: Acrophyseter, Albicetus, Brygmophyseter, Livyatan and Zygophyseter. [1] All species are known by at least a ...
Physeteroidea is a superfamily that includes three extant species of whales: the sperm whale, in the genus Physeter, and the pygmy sperm whale and dwarf sperm whale, in the genus Kogia. In the past, these genera have sometimes been united in a single family, the Physeteridae, with the two Kogia species in the subfamily Kogiinae; however, recent ...
Scaldicetus is an extinct genus of highly predatory macroraptorial sperm whale. Although widely used for a number of extinct physeterids with primitive dental morphology consisting of enameled teeth, Scaldicetus as generally recognized appears to be a wastebasket taxon filled with more-or-less unrelated primitive sperm whales.
Zygophyseter varolai is an extinct sperm whale that lived during the Tortonian age of the Late Miocene 11.2 to 7.6 million years ago. It is known from a single specimen from the Pietra Leccese Formation in Italy. It was a member of a stem group of fossil macroraptorial sperm whales (often shortened to "raptorial") also including Brygmophyseter ...
• Livyatan was described by Lambert et al. (2010) and is primarily known from a large, fairly complete ~3 metres (9.8 ft) long skull, MUSM 1676. The Livyatan silhouettes in this image represent two different size estimates by Lambert et al., one estimate based on the modern-day sperm whale and the other estimate based on the incompletely ...
The species was considered to be synonymous with the pygmy sperm whale (Kogia breviceps) from 1878 until 1998. The dwarf sperm whale is a small whale, 2 to 2.7 m (6 ft 7 in to 8 ft 10 in) and 136 to 272 kg (300 to 600 lb), that has a grey coloration, square head, small jaw, and robust body. Its appearance is very similar to the pygmy sperm ...
Basilosaurus (meaning "king lizard") is a genus of large, predatory, prehistoric archaeocete whale from the late Eocene, approximately 41.3 to 33.9 million years ago (mya). First described in 1834, it was the first archaeocete and prehistoric whale known to science. [2] Fossils attributed to the type species B. cetoides were discovered in the ...