Do any of Old Tom's descendants survive? Geneticists drilled DNA from the tooth and jawbone of the killer whale that local accounts at Eden credited with helping the whalers run down baleen whales in Twofold Bay, and found no clear descendant among the killer whales they could sample

Do any of Old Tom's descendants survive? Geneticists drilled DNA from the tooth and jawbone of the killer whale that local accounts at Eden credited with helping the whalers run down baleen whales in Twofold Bay, and found no clear descendant among the killer whales they could sample

A 2023 ancestry study recovered 11,464 bases of Old Tom's mitochondrial genome from his mounted museum skeleton and set it into a global dataset that came to 490 mitogenomes. Separate nuclear comparisons place his closest match among contemporary New Zealand killer whales, and find that most of the variation in his genome is carried by none of the animals the team sampled.