Rare New Beaked Whale Species Has Been Discovered

The global team of experts searched museums and other sources for DNA samples to determine the existence of the new whale, which is smaller and darker in color than the more common Baird’s beaked whale.

The scientists determined that the whale that washed ashore in 2014 was not an adult after determining that adults of the species measure about 25 feet.

The carcass seemed to belong to a seasoned whale with worn and yellow teeth, belonging to a species that grows to be 35 or 40 feet.

Japanese researchers were the first to suspect that the new species might exist, based on a genetic analysis in 2013 of three black beaked whales that had washed ashore in northern Japan.

If you’re wondering how researchers could have missed a species the size of a whale, the answer is fairly simple.

Yesterday, a team of scientists announced the discovery of a brand new species of beaked whale.

“We don’t know how many there are, where they’re typically found, anything”, Phillip Morin, the study’s lead author and molecular geneticist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center, reportedly said.

“It boggles my mind to think that a large, very different-looking whale has gone unnoticed by the scientific community for so long”, Robert Pitman of the Society for Marine Mammalogy, who wasn’t involved in the study, told National Geographic.

For further clarity, Morin sent tissues samples to the Marine Mammal and Turtle Division of NOAA Fisheries’ Southwest Fisheries Science Center, California. “Clearly this species is very rare, and reminds us how much we have to learn about the ocean and even some of its largest inhabitants”, according to a news report published by Phys News.

Scientists have made the rare discovery of a new whale species.

There is a similar but separate, smaller species of black beaked whale.

In 2014 scientists found a dead beaked whale on St. George Island, one of the Pribilof Islands in the Bering Sea.

Now, the findings suggest this new species and Baird’s beaked whale are actually each more closely related to Arnoux’s beaked whale, who lives in the Southern Hemisphere, than they are to each other. What they found were samples that were actually hidden in plain sight such as the Smithsonian display of a whale skull, which was mistaken for the Baird’s beaked whale. Another specimen discovered in Alaska was in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History. The skeleton was subsequently studied and measured by researchers, cleaned, reassembled, and hung up in a local high school, providing valuable data about the whale’s entire body.

A new species of beaked whale has been discovered in Alaska.

Later on genetic tests proved that it was the novel species.

“We’re using more and more technologies to get us there – but as some people have said, we know more about the surface of the moon than we do about the bottom of the ocean”.

Co-author Erich Hoyt, a research fellow with Whale and Dolphin Conservation in the United Kingdom and co-director of the Russian Cetacean Habitat Project, said that management needs to be considered for the new species of beaked whale, considering how rare it appears to be.

“We knew it was not any whale we knew from our area”, Ridgway said in the announcement.

This person assumed it was a Baird’s beaked whale.