Published:
Dec 2, 2024 16:22 GMT
A team of New Zealand experts hopes to obtain information about the animal’s diet and behavior from the perfectly preserved corpse.
An interdisciplinary team of New Zealand scientists began the first dissection of a spadetooth whale, the rarest species of whale in the world, this Monday. reported AP.
Known as the Bahamonde mesoplodon or Travers’ beaked whale, this species is so elusive that it has never been documented alive and almost nothing is known about it. There are only seven specimens of that creature, according to samples of skeletons that have been found in the last 150 years.
“I can’t tell you how extraordinary it is,” Anton van Helden, senior marine science adviser at the New Zealand Conservation Agency, who has studied beaked whales for 35 years, said of the find. “For me personally, it’s incredible,” said the expert.
The male specimen, which is being studied, was found on a beach in New Zealand in July of this year. The cause of his death is known.
It is still not known where the species lives in the ocean, why it has never been sighted in the wild or what its brain is like. All beaked whales have different stomach systems and researchers don’t know how they process their food.
The study of the 5-meter-long, perfectly preserved mammal is expected to last all of next week.
“There may be parasites completely new to science that live only in this whale,” said van Helden, who also hopes to learn how the species produces sound and what it feeds on.
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