In 1846, zoologist John Edward Gray assigned the false killer whale to the genus Orca with the killer whale (now Orcinus orca). Until 1861, when the first carcasses washed up on the shores of Kiel Bay in Denmark, the species was thought to be extinct. Based on these and a pod that beached itself three months later in November, zoologist Johannes Theodor Reinhardt moved the species in 1862 to the newly erected genus Pseudorca, which established it as being neither a porpoise nor a killer whale.[5][6] However, the name "false killer whale" comes from the apparent similarity between its skull and that of the killer whale.[7]