New Delhi, Aug. 16 -- Long before whales were majestic, gentle giants, some of their prehistoric ancestors were tiny, weird and feral. A chance discovery of a 25 million-year-old fossil on an Australian beach has allowed paleontologists to identify a rare, entirely new species that could unlock mysteries of whale evolution.

Researchers this week officially named Janjucetus dullardi, a cartoonish creature with bulging eyes the size of tennis balls, in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society. Unlike today's whales, the juvenile specimen was small enough to fit in a single bed.

Boasting fiendish teeth and a shark-like snout, however, this oddball of the ocean was nasty, mean and built to hunt.

"It was, let's say, deceptively cute," ...