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KEEP YOUR EYES PEELED FOR THESE RARELY SEEN WHALES
Nothing much is known about the following whales, except that they exist and visit our shores.
Sometimes the circumstances which bring new species to light are so circuitous, that the failure of any of a number of vital connections can result in their being displaced altogether. There must be species of cetacean still undescribed solely for lack of the appropriate accident. The Splaytooth BeakedWhale (Andrew's) and the Skew Beaked Whale (Hector's) are two such as this.
ANDREW'S
In 1904 the American Museum of Natural History in New York purchased the mounted skeleton of an adult male beaked whale, along with a number of other specimens, from Henry Ward's Natural Science Establishment. Roy Chapman Andrews, a 23-year-old naturalist, studied the skeleton care¬fully and concluded that it was new to science; he established that it had been stranded on Brighton Beach near Canterbury, New Zealand. He called it M. bowdoini in honour of James Bowdoin, an eighteenth-century American amateur zoologist who was Colonial Governor of Massachusetts and First Pres¬ident of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Today there are at least 6 specimens of M. bowdoini known from New Zealand and 1 each from Tasmania and western Australia. The Splaytooth BeakedWhale (Andrew's
HECTOR'S
Classification In 1862 a skull was taken from a whale stranded in Porirua Harbour in Cook Strait, New Zealand; in 1866 when a similar whale was captured in nearby Titai Bay the entire skeleton was collected. Both specimens were given to the Colonial Museum in Wellington, where the Curator, Sir James Hector, identified them simply as belonging to a 'smaller ziphid whale'. The skulls were sent to the British Museum as part of an exchange of material and examined there by Gray, who recognized them as juveniles and assumed that they were fourtooth whales, but nevertheless found them distinctive enough to warrant the creation of a new species, Berardius hectori. In 1873 another whale was captured in Titai Bay in New Zealand. Hector classified this one himself as Mesoplodon knoxi.
Gray died in 1875 and Flower, looking again at the skulls of Berardius hectori, in the light of Hector's subsequent discovery of Mesoplodon knoxi, decided that they were also beaked rather than fourtooth whales and in 1878 reclassified them all as Mesoplodon hectori. Almost a century later, despite the discovery of another whale with similar teeth in the Falklands in 1952, one cetologist still insisted that the 4 known specimens were all fourtooth whales, and merely juveniles of the well-known Southern Fourtooth Whale (Berardius arnuxii 13). The dispute was settled conclusively only in 1967 when 2 more specimens were stranded at the mouth of the Lottering River in South Africa, and a fully adult animal turned up in Tasmania. These made it possible for Moore to establish Mesoplodon hectori as a true beaked whale, rare but a species in its own right. Skew Beaked Whale (Hector's)
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ANDREW'S
Classification In 1862 a skull was taken from a whale stranded in Porirua Harbour in Cook Strait, New Zealand; in 1866 when a similar whale was captured in nearby Titai Bay the entire skeleton was collected. Both specimens were given to the Colonial Museum in Wellington, where the Curator, Sir James Hector, identified them simply as belonging to a 'smaller ziphid whale'. The skulls were sent to the British Museum as part of an exchange of material and examined there by Gray, who recognized them as juveniles and assumed that they were fourtooth whales, but nevertheless found them distinctive enough to warrant the creation of a new species, Berardius hectori. In 1873 another whale was captured in Titai Bay in New Zealand. Hector classified this one himself as Mesoplodon knoxi.