A team of researchers have decided to name a recently identified ancient whale species after novel Moby Dick.

A fossil of a 15 million-year-old sperm whale was stored at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History for nine years. The specimen was wrongly classified as belonging to a group of extinct walruses. However, a team of two scientists from the museum re-examined the fossil and said that they believe that it is from an ancient species of sperm whale, which has not been discovered yet.The fossils were originally discovered in the 1880s and the specimen dates back between 14 and 16 million years.

Alexandra Boersma, lead researcher on a study, and Nick Pyenson, the museum's curator of marine mammals decided to name the species after the genus Albicetusoxymyceterus, which translates to "white whale". The name refers to the enormous whale written about in the novel Moby Dick.

Pyenson said in a press release that ,“While we don't know what its skin color in life actually looked like, the color of the fossil is an ashen white. It only seemed appropriate to evoke Melville's white sperm whale, Moby Dick. Especially since we studied Albicetusoxymyceterusalongside the skeletons of some of its modern-day relatives in the collections here at the Smithsonian.”