The sharp eyes of an Italian stonecutter were the first to spy a new ancient species of whale 40 million years after it was first encased in stone.
The fossil, of a new ancient whale species called Aegyptocetus tarfa, was found in a block of limestone headed to decorate an Italian building. The stonecutter realized after slicing through the stone block that he was looking at the cross section of a fossilized skull, and he contacted Giovanni Bianucci, a researcher at the University of Pisa, to help identify it.
The whale belongs to a group of whales ancestral to all of today's modern whales, including the toothed whales, like the dolphin, and baleen whales, like the blue whale.
The remains also show the scars of a shark attack, which may have led to the beast's demise.
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