ByChris Ciaccia-Live Science Contributora day ago

• https://www.livescience.com/stranded-whale-new-species-endangered.html

This 38-foot-long (11.5 meters) baleen whale stranded off Florida in 2019. The adult male is now considered part of a completely new, and endangered, species called Rice’s whale.(Image: © Florida Everglades National Park)

A 38-foot-long (11.5 meters) whale that washed ashore in the Florida Everglades in January 2019 turns out to be a completely new species. And it’s already considered endangered, scientists say.

When the corpse of the behemoth washed up along Sandy Key — underweight with a hard piece of plastic in its gut — scientists thought it was a subspecies of the Bryde’s (pronounced “broodus”) whale, a baleen whale species in the same group that includeshumpbackandblue whales. That subspecies was named Rice’s whale. Now, after genetic analysis of other Rice’s whales along with an examination of the skull from the Everglades whale, researchers think that…