A mysterious type of whale that is rarely encountered by humans was discovered late Tuesday night on the sand at Venice Beach, California.
The odd-looking mammal, with a dolphin-shaped head, is either a female Stejneger's beaked whale or an even rarer Ginkgo-toothed beaked whale.
It measured nearly 14 feet and weighed nearly 2,000 pounds. There's a discrepancy as to whether it washed ashore alive, but it was dead by the time scientists began to inspect the carcass.
Its body was scarred from the bites of cookie-cutter sharks, but such scarring is common among beaked whales. The mammal is being studied at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History, and scientists hope to determine the species within a few days.
The Stejneger's beaked whale is is also referred to as the Bering Sea Whale, because of where it typically lives, or the saber-toothed whale, because males boast long, sharp two long teeth that protrude upward from each side of their lower jaw.
Ginkgo-toothed beaked whales inhabit tropical and temperate waters of the Indopacific and are not typical in waters north of Baja California.
If it's a Stejneger's beaked whale, it marks only the second time the species has been found in Southern California. The other discovery was in 1999, when a live specimen stranded itself on the shore near Malibu, before eventually dying.
If it's a Ginkgo-toothed beaked whale it marks only the third time the species has been found in the eastern North Pacific. (The other two were in Del Mar, in 1954, and Baja California in 1980.)
These are among six species of beaked whales categorized into the Alaska-California-Oregon-Washington stock. The combined estimated population for all six species is only between 575 and 1,000 animals.
Little is known about the life history of beaked whales because the animals are incredibly elusive, making them almost impossible to study in the wild.
"They're super shy, they barely come up to the surface, they're not boat friendly and go on these incredibly long dives," said Alisa Schulman-Janiger, an American Cetacean Society whale researcher. "They don't ever come near you. That's why this is so exciting–because they're so mysterious."
–Pete Thomas, via GrindTv
–Photos: Alisa Schulman-Janiger poses alongside beaked whale (top); beaked whale's fluke (middle), and Dave Janiger preparing to load the whale onto the museum truck. Courtesy of Alisa Schulman-Janiger
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