Massive Predatory Dolphins Once Terrorized Earth's Oceans - ScienceAlert

Importantly, the discovery could help us better understand how the two types of modern whales – toothed whales, such as dolphins, and baleen whales, like humpbacks – evolved their unique features, such as flippers and tail propulsion.

The skeleton was found in the 1990s but initially misclassified, and is the first nearly complete Ankylorhiza tiedemani skeleton to be analysed – previously the creature could only be studied from a partial rostrum – or snout – fossil, but now the cetacean can be much more fully understood.

One of the main revelations is that many aspects of the skeleton – the skull and tail shape, the short upper arm bone in the flipper, the shape of the teeth – suggest that the two modern types of whales, toothed and baleen, evolved many of the same features in parallel independently of each other, rather than inheriting them from the same ancestor as previously thought.