Bryde's whale has long been a taxonomic tangle, a cluster of similar forms across warm oceans that resisted clean division. Genetic sampling of Gulf of Mexico animals showed them to be strongly distinct, and the point was settled by a specimen: a whale that stranded in Florida in 2019 and yielded a complete skull, the first available for the form. Its cranial morphology differed consistently from Bryde's whale.
The species was named Balaenoptera ricei in 2021 for the biologist Dale Rice. Surveys put the population at roughly fifty individuals, confined to a narrow strip along the shelf break in the north-eastern Gulf. That makes it among the most restricted and least numerous whale species known.
Describing a large mammal in the twenty-first century is unusual but not unique among cetaceans, where skulls are scarce and forms look alike. The practical consequence was legal: recognition as a distinct species reshaped how the population is assessed and protected.