Leviathan melvillei chomps down on a baleen whale. HIT PLAY, above, the see its fossilised teeth.

Three lower teeth (a,b,c) of Leviathan melvillei compared to teeth of the modern sperm whale Physeter macrocephalus (d) and the modern killer whale Orcinus orca (e).

Credit: G. Bianucci (Universitá di Pisa), O. Lambert (MNHN) and P. Loubry (MNHN)

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BRISBANE: A 12-million-year-old giant sperm whale, which was was one of the biggest raptorial predators of all time, has been discovered in Peru, researchers said.

The now-extinct species had teeth up to 36 centimetres long and 12 centimetres across, and has one of the biggest bites ever discovered in vertebrates, according to a report today in the journal Nature.

"This sperm whale could firmly hold large prey with its interlocking teeth, inflict deep wounds and tear large pieces from the body of the victim," said lead author Olivier Lambert, a palaeontologist at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels, Belgium.

Giant whale had three metre skull

The whale was named Leviathan melvillei, after the mythological sea monster Leviathan, and Herman Melville, the author of Moby Dick, said Lambert.

The three-metre skull and jaw were discovered in Peru's Pisco-Ica Desert during a 2008 expedition by Klaas Post, a fossil curator at Natural History Museum Rotterdam, Holland.

Scientists suspected that such a whale existed, because similar teeth had been found worldwide, but with no skull to confirm their origins, Lambert said.

Giant Moby Dick ate other whales

Leviathan was likely a similar size to present-day giant sperm whales, at 13 to 18 metres long, but it probably had a very different diet to squid-eating modern sperm whales, which catch their prey by suction and have no teeth on the upper jaw, Lambert said.

Instead, Leviathan probably ate baleen whales, which are plentiful in the Miocene fossil record, and killed in a similar way to modern killer whales, by biting, shearing, and tearing with their teeth.

Ewan Fordyce, a palaeontologist at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, said it was a significant and unexpected find.

Further studies on the fossil could reveal whether Leviathan was really a raptorial feeder, or whether it also fed by suction like its modern-day relatives, he said.

"Studies of micro-wear on the teeth would help indicate this," Fordyce said.