Don't call me Ishmael. Call me "Albicetus."
Scientists on Wednesday said fossils unearthed in 1909 in Santa Barbara, California, that had been wrongly categorized for decades as belonging to a group of extinct walruses, were in fact the remains of a fearsome sperm whale that swam the Pacific Ocean 15 million years ago during the Miocene Epoch.
They named it Albicetus, meaning "white whale," a reference to the leviathan in Herman Melville's classic 1851 novel "Moby-Dick," which chronicles Captain Ahab's obsession with a huge white sperm whale.