INTRODUCTION As a natural outgrowth of a revisionary study of the genus Meso-plodon of the beaked whale family, Hyperoodontidae, 1 toward which I have been working for several years (Moore and Wood, 1957; Moore, 1958, 1960, 1963b, 1966; Moore and Gilmore, 1965) it has recently been possible to devote a little time to seeking out and test-ing diagnostic characters of the other genera of the beaked whale family. That some diagnostic characters are badly needed is indi-cated, for example, by a beaked whale from the Scottish coast re-ported to be Mesoplodon mirus (Stephen, 1931) because its teeth were laterally compressed (Fig. 1, right), but, on checking its nasal bones in October, 1963, at the Royal Scottish Museum, I found it to be Ziphius cavirostris. Similarly, Mousset and Duperier (1956) re-ported at length upon the first Mesoplodon mirus from the coasts of France, but their published photographs of the skull of their speci-men showed it to be Ziphius cavirostris. A Ziphius cavirostris 28 feet long was reported by the late A. C. Stephen (1932, pp. 164-166, fig. 2) who illustrated it by a photograph of its teeth which, like its body length, are those properly of Hyperoodon ampullatus (Fig. 1, center). The urgent need of diagnoses for the hyperoodontid genera of whales is sharply indicated by two papers by McCann recently pub-lished in New Zealand. One of these McCann (1962b) devoted to removing the species Mesoplodon hectori (Gray) 1871, from the genus Mesoplodon and recognizing it as the young of a different genus and species, Berardius arnuxi, which otherwise ". . . is only known from adults!" (Italics and exclamation point McCann's, 1962b, p. 84.) In consecutive pagination with that, McCann (1962c) published an-other paper devoted to removing the species Mesoplodon pacificus Longman, 1926, from the genus Mesoplodon because he had formed the opinion that the one known specimen of pacificus (a skull) must be the female of a different genus and species, Hyperoodon planifrons, 1 After Gray (1866, p. 62) used the name Hyperoodontidae for the beaked whale family in listing the families of whales, he (op. cit., p. 326) noted the priority of its type genus and then rejected it in favor of Ziphiidae for further use in that work and later ones, on grounds not acceptable today by the International Rules for Zoological Nomenclature (inadvertent use of prefix hyper instead of hypo). 209
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