New Species of Whale Discovered

dlesko writes: "Scientists have discovered a new species of whale, a startling find made through DNA analysis of some of the marine mammals that washed ashore in California over the past three decades."

Comments

Re:strange reporting

[nucal]

Boy, that story was wafer-thin.

This is an abstract of what looks like a comparable study done with dolphins. Most of the original classification of species was done using fairly gross comparisons - almost to the level of "are they basically the same shape?" (sympatric morphotypes). What Heyning's group is doing is to compare the DNA sequence of a elements from a mitochondrial gene, cytochrome b, isolated from different dolphins or whales. Mitochondrial DNA is unique, in that it does not mix with nuclear DNA and is only transmitted to offspring from the mother, not the father. This means that since different species do not interbreed, species specific differences in mitochondrial DNA sequences will be more pronounced than in the more "typical" gene sequence. By grouping individual animals by mitochondrial DNA sequences, they can then use this to go back and identify subtle differences in physiology that you otherwise couldn't do with the small subpopulation of beached whales.

A similar approach has been used to analyze human evolution, among other things.