Scientists discovered a new species of whale with a bird-like beak on the coast of Japan

Japanese scientists have discovered a new species of whale called Berardius minimus whose body is mostly black and has a small beak like a bird.

According to information from New Atlas, Japanese scientists have discovered a new species of whale. The new species, Berardius minimus , has a body length of 6.2 to 6.9m and is mostly black, and they possess a rather interesting feature is an additional beak.

Despite the fact that this whale has long been familiar to the locals, it has only been described by scientists through six specimens found in Hokkaido and near the Okhotsk coast.

In fact, this new whale has long been known to local fishermen.

Specimens of this species were studied by scientists from Hokkaido University, Japan National Museum of Natural Science, Iwate University and Japan National Museum of Natural History.

Although they share some common characteristics with the known whales, they also possess quite a few unique characteristics that can be classified as an entirely new species.

The scientists also said that the new whale belongs to the genus muzzle whale . This is a very small genus and until recently there were only two species known as the Baird's Bumped Whale (Berardius bairdi) , living in the North Pacific and the Arnoux Bumped Whale .

The image shows the recently discovered Berardius minimus (top) and the known muzzle whale - Berardius bairdi (below).

The scientists discovered that the Berardius minimus is smaller than the Berardius bairdi - up to 10 meters in body length.

In addition, the bodies of these two species also have relatively different shapes, the Berardius minimus has mostly black body color while the Bairdi whale is blue-gray.

For further study, the scientists analyzed the skull, bone structure and DNA of this species.

An analysis of the mitochondrial DNA and the skull, the skeletal structure of the new whale shows that they belong to the genus muzzle whale, but differ from the two previously known species.

"About the Berardius minimus, there is still so much we still don't know," said Takashi Matsuishi, the lead researcher of the study. "We still do not know what the children of the Berardius minimus look like and there are still many issues related to the species distribution that remain unanswered. We hope to continue to expand our understanding of the Berardius minimus."

For a while, the Berardius minimus was still an undiscovered muzzle whale for world biologists, but experts from Hokkaido University, Takashi Matsuishiya, and his colleagues studied Rescuing whale carcasses discovered on the northern coast of Hokkaido in 2012.

They are very similar to the Baird's muzzle whale, but at the same time they have some distinct characteristics: black and smaller, unlike the Baird's muzzle whale, the size of this new species is no more than 7m. In addition, this new species possesses a shorter beak than body proportion when compared to known species.

However, this may not be the last new species of the muzzle whale genus to be found. Local fishermen say there is still another black whale with a body even smaller than the Berardius minimus in the Karasu area.

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