Uhen 2008 created a new clade, Pelagiceti, for the common ancestor of Basilosauridae and all of its descendants, including Neoceti, the living cetaceans.

He placed Georgiacetus near the base of this clade together with Eocetus and perhaps Babiacetus because of the assumed presence of a fluke and very compressed posterior caudal vertebrae in these genera.

[2] Georgiacetus is an extinct protocetid (early whale) which lived about 40 million years ago and hunted the rich, Suwannee Current powered coastal sea which once covered the Southeastern United States.

The main mass of bones were first reviewed in the field (1983) by geologist E. A. Shapiro of the Georgia Geologic Survey (which was "abolished" in 2004).

On Shapiro’s recommendation, Georgia Southern University was called in and Richard Petkewich and Gale Bishop led the effort to recover the specimen.

[6] Dr. Richard Hulbert, also with Georgia Southern University at that time, led the research team which described the find as a new genus and species in 1998.

The front teeth were curved, banana-shaped (though in life most of the banana shape would have been deep in the jaw with just the tip exposed) and peg-like.

Basilosaurids possessed teeth and a skull remarkably similar in function and structure, both have nostrils (blowholes) located halfway back on the snout, just in front of the eyes.

It probably swam using its hindlimbs by wiggling its hips and moving its trunk up and down, a locomotor behaviour abandoned by modern whales.

Yet the hip bones were not fused to the spine, (neither are those of Basilosaurus) which suggests that the Georgia whale probably could not support its own weight out of the water.

The invertebrate fossils recovered along with the main mass of bones showed that the whale died well off-shore in a shallow, open water environment approximately 30 mi (48 km) from the coastline (today Georgia's Fall Line).

It was a warm, fertile shallow sea very much like the one which covered southeastern United States 40 million years ago when whales (Georgiacetus & Carolinacetus) were already present in America.

[11] Whichever route taken, the fact that the journey occurred shows that by the time Carolinacetus and Georgiacetus lived, whales (which did not yet possess flukes) were already capable of extended deep water activity.