The
minke whale, or
lesser rorqual, is a species complex of baleen whale. The two species of minke whale are the common minke whale and the Antarctic minke whale. The minke whale was first described by the Danish naturalist Otto Fabricius in 1780, who assumed it must be an already known species and assigned his specimen to
Balaena rostrata, a name given to the northern bottlenose whale by Otto Friedrich Mรผller in 1776. In 1804, Bernard Germain de Lacรฉpรจde described a juvenile specimen of
Balaenoptera acuto-rostrata. The name is a partial translation of Norwegian
minkehval, possibly after a Norwegian whaler named Meincke, who mistook a northern minke whale for a blue whale.