A newly discovered species of living baleen whale

Shiro Wada (), Masayuki Oishi and Tadasu K. Yamada ()
Additional contact information
Shiro Wada: Fisheries Research Agency
Masayuki Oishi: Iwate Prefectural Museum
Tadasu K. Yamada: National Science Museum

Nature, 2003, vol. 426, issue 6964, 278-281

Abstract: Abstract In the late 1970s eight Balaenoptera specimens of unknown identity were caught in the lower latitudinal Indo-Pacific waters by Japanese research whaling vessels1. The combination of the allozyme patterns and physical maturity of the eight specimens separated them from all acknowledged Balaenoptera species2. In September 1998 we collected a medium-sized baleen whale carcass on a coastal island in the Sea of Japan. This specimen and the previously collected eight specimens resembled Balaenoptera physalus (fin whale) in external appearance but were much smaller. Comparison of external morphology, osteology and mitochondrial DNA data grouped the nine specimens as a single species but separated them from all known baleen whale species. Therefore, here we describe a new species of Balaenoptera, which is characterized by its unique cranial morphology, its small number of baleen plates, and by its distant molecular relationships with all of its congeners. Our analyses also separated Balaenoptera brydei (Bryde's whale)3,4 and Balaenoptera edeni (Eden's whale)5 into two distinct species, raising the number of known living Balaenoptera species to eight.

Date: 2003
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature02103 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:426:y:2003:i:6964:d:10.1038_nature02103

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/nature02103

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().