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Never Before Seen Whale
Author of Article: Veronique Greenwood
12 November 2012
Summary: In December 2010 scientists found two Gray's beaked whales who washed up at a place in New Zealand called Opape Beach. A few months later after the scientists examined the animals, they realized that they weren't the Gray's beaked whales, but that they were two spade-toothed beaked whales, the most mysterious whales in the world! This is because they were never actually seen by humans, but we know about them from bone fragments and fossils that have washed up in the last 140 years! The only evidence for their existence which we had before this discovery was a lower jaw and two skulls. A mammal scientist named Anton van Helden was told all this and Anton van Helden and his team started working right away: they found out that the female whale was 17 feet long while the young male whale was 11.5 feet long. They also examined the colors and bones of the whales and saw why they can be so easily confused with other beaked whales. The scientists were fascinated because before this no one could even try to imagine what these whales looked like from the fossils. This discovery made scientists more interesting into beaked whales and this is only a small step in their study because nobody saw this specie of whales alive!
Thoughts: I found this article really interesting because scientists have finally found out what this whale specie really looks like and they have a chance to study this animal carefully while before they had only two fossils. This is related to science because the article explained how it was found out which species it really was and how the scientists carefully examined the whales. What I found surprising about this is that scientists knew about this species of whales only from fossils without ever seeing it! This article also shows us how little we really know about our environment and it shows the bio diversity of the species on our planet!
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