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Giant 5-mln-year-old whale tooth washes ashore in Australia

Xinhua, April 21, 2016 Adjust font size:

A giant fossilized whale tooth -- believed to be five million years old -- has washed ashore on an Australian beach, proving the now extinct species' territory was more expansive than first thought.

Paleontologists believe the tooth, which is bigger than that of a Tyrannosaurus-rex, belonged to a close ancestral relation of Livyatan melvillei, an ancient species of Peruvian sperm whale that died out millions of years ago.

It is the first evidence that this carnivorous species, which could grow up to 18 meters long and weigh around 40 tonnes, lived outside of the Americas.

The scientific discovery was stumbled on by a local man at Beaumaris Bay, a Melbourne beach where fossils have been found in the past.

"After I found the tooth I just sat down and stared at it in disbelief," Murray Orr, the Australian fossil enthusiast who found the three-kilogram 30-centimeter-long tooth, told News Corp on Thursday. "I knew this was an important find that needed to be shared with everyone."

In 2008, international paleontologists found a three-meter whale skull in Southern Peru that had comparable tooth dimensions to the Australian find. They named the prehistoric species Livyatan melvillei in honor of Herman Melville, author of the 1851 mythical whale tale Moby Dick.

The Peruvian scientists dated their fossilized head to around 13 million years ago, while the Australian researchers estimated their fossil was much younger.

"If we only had today's sperm whales to go on, we could not predict that just 5 million years ago there were giant predatory sperm whales with immense teeth that hunted other whales," Museum Victoria's senior curator of vertebrate paleontology, Doctor Fitzgerald, said.

"Most sperm whales for the past 20 million years have been of the whale-killing kind."

Similar to Moby Dick, the fictional white whale, the Australian species would have lurked the sea attacking other whales as its main food source.

Modern sperm whales, however, are not cannibals and prey on squid and fish.

The discovery has been donated to Museum Victoria where it will research further. Endit