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Description
In an alternate timeline, that split from ours in the late Oligocene, some 24 million years ago, a very large mass extinction occured at the end of the Oligocene epoch, before the start of the Miocene. This caused severe rewrites of the worldwide faunal assemblages that shape the animal life of Earth, and make it fundamentally different from our present, 24 million years later.

In the wake of the mass extinction, very few cetaceans survived. Mysticetes have gone completely extinct, and among the few odontocetes to have made it past the extinction, the descendants of the Waipatiidae family, have generated a lineage of filter-feeding animals that utilize baleen, converging greatly with baleen whales. The common spotted dwhale (Allobalaenus atlanticus) is a species of gregarious cetacean that lives across most of the northern Atlantic ocean. Males can measure 8 meters in length. These cetaceans are docile and very curious, loving to hang around boats (this timeline also has its own sapient civilizational species, descendants of stem-galagids). These are surface filter feeders, so they're very easy to observe. They protect their young from predators by forming a protective circle around their calves. Because they spend a long time in the surface, they're particularly susceptible to attacks by marine skyhounds, a lineage of large sea-dwelling pack-hunting carnivorous philisid bats. These flying mammals can be particularly dangerous to sea-faring sapient galagids, so the presence of a pod of dwhales is, usually, seen as good fortune.

Description
In an alternate timeline, that split from ours in the late Oligocene, some 24 million years ago, a very large mass extinction occured at the end of the Oligocene epoch, before the start of the Miocene. This caused severe rewrites of the worldwide faunal assemblages that shape the animal life of Earth, and make it fundamentally different from our present, 24 million years later.

In the wake of the mass extinction, very few cetaceans survived. Mysticetes have gone completely extinct, and among the few odontocetes to have made it past the extinction, the descendants of the Waipatiidae family, have generated a lineage of filter-feeding animals that utilize baleen, converging greatly with baleen whales. The common spotted dwhale (Allobalaenus atlanticus) is a species of gregarious cetacean that lives across most of the northern Atlantic ocean. Males can measure 8 meters in length. These cetaceans are docile and very curious, loving to hang around boats (this timeline also has its own sapient civilizational species, descendants of stem-galagids). These are surface filter feeders, so they're very easy to observe. They protect their young from predators by forming a protective circle around their calves. Because they spend a long time in the surface, they're particularly susceptible to attacks by marine skyhounds, a lineage of large sea-dwelling pack-hunting carnivorous philisid bats. These flying mammals can be particularly dangerous to sea-faring sapient galagids, so the presence of a pod of dwhales is, usually, seen as good fortune.