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
Geneticists have analyzed DNA from the skeleton of 'Old Tom,' a famous killer whale from Eden, Australia, to determine if any descendants survive today. The study found no clear contemporary descendants, though it highlighted the deep cultural connection between the Thaua people and the whales.
Why it matters
This research bridges the gap between modern genomic science and Indigenous oral history, providing a unique look at ecological and cultural heritage.
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.
By Life Signs · Edited by Christy Jeremia
Published September 7, 2026 · How we edit
The drill was a hand-held Dremel. It took roughly half a gram of powder from a tooth on the upper jaw of a mounted killer whale skeleton on the New South Wales coast, and another half gram from inside the lower mandible. Before each cut the patch was sprayed with ten per cent bleach, left for thirty seconds and wiped down with ethanol, to remove any contaminating DNA.
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