Mar 17, 2015 12:44 PM EDT By Russell Westerholm, UniversityHerald Reporter

More than 30 years lost, a 17-million-year-old whale skull is providing scientists with clues to climate change that drove human evolution at the time.

According to the Los Angeles Times, the fossil at the center of the study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is a beak with part of the jawbone still intact. The whale apparently swam the wrong way up the African River millions upon millions of years ago.

"The whale was stranded up river at a time when east Africa was at sea level and was covered with forest and jungle," study co-author Louis L. Jacobs, a vertebrate paleontologist at Southern Methodist University, said in a press release. "As that part of the continent rose up, that caused the climate to become drier and drier. So over millions of years, forest gave way to grasslands. Primates evolved to adapt to grasslands and dry country. And that's when - in human evolution - the primates started to walk upright."

The Smithsonian Institution's James G. Mead first detailed his 1964 discovery of the fossil in a paper published about 10 years later. Jacobs told the Times he has been trying to locate it since 1980.

"The whale is telling us all kinds of things," Jacobs told the newspaper. "It tells us the starting point for all that uplift that changed the climate that led to humans. It's amazing."

The paleontology chief at the National Museums of Kenya when started his quest, Jacobs said he finally found the fossil in 2011. He credited an official at Harvard with the assist.

"It was protected by a plaster jacket, so you couldn't really see it," Jacobs said. "I suspect nobody knew what it was. It was just kept in the collections there."

The whale's strange journey up the African River is a rare opportunity to delve deeper into ancient land development.

"You don't usually find whales so far inland," Jacobs said in the release. "Many of the known beaked whale fossils are dredged by fishermen from the bottom of the sea."

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