An Omura’s whale approaches the surface while feeding off the northwest coast of Madagascar. Photo Credit: Adapted from Cerchio et al. (2015), Royal Society Publishing.

Omura's whales were long mistaken for another species. Genetic data confirmed their uniqueness in 2003, but all of the information came from dead samples — whale bits left over from Japanese ...

Salvatore Cerchio stunned the small world of whale science in 2015 when he found examples of a new species in the wild for the first time. Now, he’s mapped the habitat of that species, called ...

For such large animals, Omura's whales are one of the most elusive species in the world — the whales were only discovered recently and had never been seen alive in the wild, until now.