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Posted: 2015-12-11T20:03:55Z | Updated: 2015-12-13T22:59:06Z

For 90 years, the strikingly white fossils of a 15 million-year-old sperm whale sat on a storage shelf in the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, incorrectly grouped with the remains of extinct walruses .

A duo of Smithsonian scientists recently took those forgotten fossils down from that old shelf, and, after re-examining and reclassifying them, realized they belonged to a previously undiscovered species of sperm whale.

Welcome to the modern world, Albicetus oxymycterus.