The world's rarest whale Omura is captured on film for the FIRST time

Footage of the rare and little-known species was captured by an international team of biologists off the coast of Madagascar.

Up until now, there had never been a confirmed sighting of the mammal in the wild by scientists and as such their numbers are unknown.

Salvatore Cerchio, who led the research while at the Wildlife Conservation Society and is a guest investigator at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) said in a news release: 

'Over the years, there have been a small handful of possible sightings of Omura's whales, but nothing that was confirmed.

'They appear to occur in remote regions and are difficult to find at sea, because they are small-they range in length from approximately 33 to 38 feet-and do not put up a prominent blow.'  

'What little we knew about these whales previously came primarily from eight specimens of Omura's whales taken in Japanese scientific whaling off the Solomon and Keeling Islands and a couple strandings of dead animals in Japan,' Cerchio said. 

'This is the first definitive evidence and detailed descriptions of Omura's whales in the wild and part of what makes this work particularly exciting.'

In a paper published this week in the Royal Society Open Science, the researchers described the whales 'foraging and vocal behaviours, and habitat preferences in the shallow waters of coastal Madagascar.'

Being substantially smaller than many other blue whale species, the Omura's whale had historically been misidentified as Bryde's whales. 

However, the animal has a unique assymetrical pigmentation on their head. 

'When we clearly saw that the right jaw was white, and the left jaw was black, we knew that we were on to something very special,' added Cerchio. 

'The only problem was that Omura's whales were not supposed to be in this part of the Indian Ocean. Rather, they should be in the West Pacific, near Thailand and the Philippines.' 

(dailymail.co.uk)