Ten years ago, Nigel Wright and I wrote the following passage for our book The Rising of the Moon. Why are we resurrecting it now? Simply because, dear Fleur is (as you know) currently working as an intern at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter, and has been involved in curating the skeleton of the very beast this article is about. So, we are pleased to reprint it, together with pictures of the whale's vertebrae..The Exmouth Herald for September 25th 1987 reported:
“Please could we have our whale teeth back
Callous looters hacked off the lower jaw of a rare whale washed up near Exmouth to steal its two front teeth. After the 20-ft long Cuvier`s beaked whale was found dead at Otter Cove on monday, Exeter's Royal Albert Museum and the British Museum in London sent experts to retrieve it for research. But during Tuesday night, the whale floated back out into Lyme Bay because nobody had secured it. In the meantime, Customs officers who had arrived to take charge of the carcase on Tuesday mornmg found that the teeth which are Government property were missing.
Mr. Kelvin Boot, from the Royal Albert Museum in Exeter, said: ''This whale is one of the rarest as far as beaching goes. There are no records of one being stranded in Britain this century. There was a sightng in the 1960's, but that is not like having the actual whale to investigate. It is a very significant find. Perhaps we should have chained it to make sure it didn't float away, but I am confident that it will turn up again on a beach along the coast. The Marines are on stand-by to tow it oft as soon as it is sighted.
We will then dissect the whale, taking samples of various organs to check for heavy metal pollution in the sea and to discover what it has bcen feeding on. So little is known about this particular beaked whale. I just hope we can get it back. We may never get the chance again.
Fortunately for the scientists the whale obliged on Thursday morning, when it was washed up at Budleigh Salterton. Mr. Keith Green, an Exmouth-based Customs and Excise officer, said:"We would like to hear from anyone who has any information on the whereabouts of its teeth - they are still the property of the crown. All whales, porpoises and dolphins stranded on the British coast are the property of the Receiver of Wrecks, a department of the Customs and Excise service.
Under its rules, the mammals' teeth have to be removed and sent to the British Museum to establish the age and sex of the whale.”
Here, we would like to note that whereas the newspaper`s conclusion that the lower jaw was hacked off by souvenir hunters is probably correct, this IS remarkably reminiscent of another scenario commonly reported in UFO related animal mutilations. The coincidence between the locations and the timing (as we shall see there were UFO reports in 1987 as well) is worth remarking upon.
As Nigel pointed out, they would have, made spectacularly uninteresting souvenirs and having come face to face as it were with another suppurating cetacean ten years later, he feels it unlikely that any but the most psychotic of curio hunters would have summoned up the intestinal fortitude to hack the jaw off the great beast. I have to agree with him, and would add that the task would have been a particularly onerous and time-consuming one, and would also add that Otter Cove is a particularly isolated spot that can only be reached by driving through the grounds of a local holiday camp. (14) (15)
If the mutilation was carried out at night (which it would have to have been in order to escape the prying eyes of gleeful holiday makers) it would seem almost impossible (having visited the location) that:
a. The operation (which would have needed a chainsaw to complete) could have been carried out without attracting attention.
b. That the perpetrators (whoever they were) could have taken the immense jaw up the treacherous cliff path without having incurred an unreasonable degree of danger.
or
c. Anyone would have bothered.
A refutation of the `callous souvenir hunter` scenario can be found in this folllowing account of the species:
“Cuvier's Beaked Whale. Order Cetacea : Family Ziphiidae :
Ziphius cavirostris
G. Cuvier
Cuvier's Beaked Whale (Ziphius cavirostris) Description. A moderately small beaked whale with upperparts ranging in color from dark brown to lead gray or blackish in color; underparts paler, but not whitish; occasionally head and upper back whitish; beak moderately prominent and the forehead rising rather sharply; lower jaw longer than upper; pectoral fin relatively small and the dorsal fin placed on posterior third of body; prominent keel extends from dorsal fin to tail; skull with length of rostrum less than twice its breadth at notch; lower jaw of males with one large tooth (about 7 cm in length and 4 cm in diameter) at the tip; in females the teeth are small and seldom break through the gums so that the animal appears to be toothless; two converging grooves on throat. Total length of adults, 5-7 m. Weight, 2.5-4.5 metric tons.
Distribution in Texas. Sparsely distributed throughout tropical and subtropical waters of the world. In the western North Atlantic, these whales are found from Massachusetts to Florida and the Gulf of Mexico.
Habits. Little is known of this whale beyond information revealed by stranded specimens. They are often observed in groups of 10-25. These whales are deep divers and may remain below water for 30 minutes or longer. They are known to eat squid, fish, crabs, and starfish.
The reproductive habits are almost unknown. There does not seem to be a distinct breeding season as calves are born year round. Calves are about 2.1 m long at birth. The length of gestation is unknown.” (16)
D.J.Coffey (1977) also notes that:
“...the male has a pair of teeth at the point of the lower jaw. In the female these do not erupt” (17)
As every report on this particular stranding has stated the animal was a female. This satisfactorily refutes any allegations that it would have been mutilated by souvenir hunters even if they had had the time, the opportunity or the motive, which is very questionable.
Another story in the Exmouth Herald a week later proclaimed:
“Hankies out for whale
Exmouth foiled out a carpet of polythene to bring ashore its most unusual visitor. a rare Cuvier's beaked whale on Friday morning. The 20ft. whale had been washed up dead on rocks at Otter Cove near Exmouth, and became a television celebrity overnight. But before experts from the Royal Albert Museum in Exeter could begin examining the five-ton female whale, thieves sawed off part of her lower law and two front teeth.
The whale was then washed away on the tide but found again in the estuary of the River Otter, at Budleigh Salutation. On Friday's high tide, Royal Marines from Limestone Camp secured lines around the whale and towed her out to sea as staff from the Exmouth Dock Company laid out a polythene carpet down Mamhead slipway on the pierheard.
As the whale was brought alongside by the Marines a line was thrown ashore to waiting dockers. A crowd of more than 100 watched the whale being pulled up the polythene carpet until the line broke. It was then a case of the one that got away as the whale drifted out to sea before the Marines nudged her back on to the slipway with inflatable boats. A new line was attached to the whale, which was pulled slowly up the sllpway and on to the road.
Several people reached for their handkerchiefs as the whale was lifted on to a waiting lorry - not to wipe away a tear, but to cover their noses. The carcass was then taken to a knacker's yard at Newton Abbot where staff from the museum began the task of stripping off the flesh. Mr. David Bolton. one of the museum team, said.' "We now know that the whale had a number of broken ribs and there was evidence of internal bleeding. This points to it having been hit by a ship or thrown across some rocks. "The whale had a punctured lung and a more detailed examination of the skeleton will provide some idea of her age.” (18)
The Ziphiidae, the family to which Cuvier`s beaked whale belongs is poorly known and full of so many zoological surprises that it has excited cryptozoologists as well as their brethren in the more mainstream branches of the narural sciences for many years.
Bernard Heuvelmans, the Belgian zoologist known universally as “The father of Cryptozoology” (19) waxed lyrical on the subject in 1968:
“No family of whales is so mysterious as the Ziphiidae, or 'Beaked Whales', which are really dolphins. Hyperoodon is the only one of its five genera which is at all common and the only one which has been known since the beginning of the last century. There seem to be several different species of Hyperoodon, or Bottlenose, reaching a length of about 30 feet, but the one most unlike the others is known almost entirely from skulls washed up in the Southern Hemisphere. Yet Hyperoodon has been caught only in the North Atlantic.
Cuvier's Whale (Ziphius) was first thought to be extinct when Georges Cuvier described in 1823 a partly petrified skull that had been washed up in the Mediterranean in 1804. Nearly half a century after the first stranding another was washed up in the same place. Later a whole specimen with an identical skeleton was found in New Zealand. Oddly enough in old specimens the skull is almost petrified, fossilised before its time, and in other respects it seems designed to fool the naturalist, for it is light above and dark below, thus breaking all the rules of animal coloration.
Mesoplodon is perhaps the most puzzling genus of all. It was first known from a carcase washed up at Elgin in Scotland and examined by Sowerby. It was brown and had a strangely curved lower jaw with only two teeth. In 1825 a similar beast, but with no teeth at all, was stranded alive at Le Havre. It lived for two days, and sightseers who had odd ideas about cetacean's diet-tried to feed it on bread soaked in water. Henri Ducrotay de Blainville studied it and christened it Aodon dalei on account of its absence of teeth, but subsequent scientists have said that it was just a Sowerby's Whale that had lost its teeth with age. It could well have been a female, for they are often found to be toothless. In 1850 Paul Gervais gave the species the name Mesoplodon bidens, which it has kept ever since. Meanwhile several different species of Mesoplodon have been reported, but their descriptions are based on so little evidence that it is hard to say whether there are ten or fifteen of them. One of the rarest is Gervais's Whale (Mesoplodon europaeus) of which only six specimens are known. The first was found floating in the English Channel in 1840; but the next three were washed up on the coast of New Jersey in 1889, 1933 and '935, and the last two, a mother and child, in Jamaica in 1953, which was rather unfortunate for a supposedly 'European' animal. Blainville's Whale (M densirostris) has an even more bizarre distribution. Only seven specimens have been found, but they could hardly have been farther apart: in the Seychelles, on Lord Howe Island, south of Africa, near Massachusetts, in Madeira and New Jersey. M stejnegeri is known only from two specimens from the Pacific coast of North America, and M. hectori from two specimens in New Zealand. The description of M bowdoini is also based on two New Zealand specimens, but as they were only skeletons we still know nothing about their external appearance. And I need hardly say that we know absolutely nothing about the habits of the various Mesoplodons, which are sometimes more than 15 feet long.
We hardly know more about the two species of Berardius, Arnoux's and Baird's Whales, which were first described in 1851 and 1883, and which may be over 40 feet long. The second has teeth which no mammalogist would have believed in had they been described by a layman, for they are embedded in cartilaginous sacs, and it seems that they can be erected at will. New species of Ziphiidae continue to be discovered. As recently as 1937 Oliver had to create a new genus, Tasmacetus, after three Beaked Whales of a hitherto unknown type were stranded in New Zealand. They were between 23 and 29 feet long; yet people still say that the sea cannot hold any large unknown animals.” (20)
In the thirty years since Heuvelmans wrote the above passage, the Ziphiidae have given up a few of their secrets and presented us with many more.
“Please could we have our whale teeth back
Callous looters hacked off the lower jaw of a rare whale washed up near Exmouth to steal its two front teeth. After the 20-ft long Cuvier`s beaked whale was found dead at Otter Cove on monday, Exeter's Royal Albert Museum and the British Museum in London sent experts to retrieve it for research. But during Tuesday night, the whale floated back out into Lyme Bay because nobody had secured it. In the meantime, Customs officers who had arrived to take charge of the carcase on Tuesday mornmg found that the teeth which are Government property were missing.
Mr. Kelvin Boot, from the Royal Albert Museum in Exeter, said: ''This whale is one of the rarest as far as beaching goes. There are no records of one being stranded in Britain this century. There was a sightng in the 1960's, but that is not like having the actual whale to investigate. It is a very significant find. Perhaps we should have chained it to make sure it didn't float away, but I am confident that it will turn up again on a beach along the coast. The Marines are on stand-by to tow it oft as soon as it is sighted.
We will then dissect the whale, taking samples of various organs to check for heavy metal pollution in the sea and to discover what it has bcen feeding on. So little is known about this particular beaked whale. I just hope we can get it back. We may never get the chance again.
Fortunately for the scientists the whale obliged on Thursday morning, when it was washed up at Budleigh Salterton. Mr. Keith Green, an Exmouth-based Customs and Excise officer, said:"We would like to hear from anyone who has any information on the whereabouts of its teeth - they are still the property of the crown. All whales, porpoises and dolphins stranded on the British coast are the property of the Receiver of Wrecks, a department of the Customs and Excise service.
Under its rules, the mammals' teeth have to be removed and sent to the British Museum to establish the age and sex of the whale.”
Here, we would like to note that whereas the newspaper`s conclusion that the lower jaw was hacked off by souvenir hunters is probably correct, this IS remarkably reminiscent of another scenario commonly reported in UFO related animal mutilations. The coincidence between the locations and the timing (as we shall see there were UFO reports in 1987 as well) is worth remarking upon.
As Nigel pointed out, they would have, made spectacularly uninteresting souvenirs and having come face to face as it were with another suppurating cetacean ten years later, he feels it unlikely that any but the most psychotic of curio hunters would have summoned up the intestinal fortitude to hack the jaw off the great beast. I have to agree with him, and would add that the task would have been a particularly onerous and time-consuming one, and would also add that Otter Cove is a particularly isolated spot that can only be reached by driving through the grounds of a local holiday camp. (14) (15)
If the mutilation was carried out at night (which it would have to have been in order to escape the prying eyes of gleeful holiday makers) it would seem almost impossible (having visited the location) that:
a. The operation (which would have needed a chainsaw to complete) could have been carried out without attracting attention.
b. That the perpetrators (whoever they were) could have taken the immense jaw up the treacherous cliff path without having incurred an unreasonable degree of danger.
or
c. Anyone would have bothered.
A refutation of the `callous souvenir hunter` scenario can be found in this folllowing account of the species:
“Cuvier's Beaked Whale. Order Cetacea : Family Ziphiidae :
Ziphius cavirostris
G. Cuvier
Cuvier's Beaked Whale (Ziphius cavirostris) Description. A moderately small beaked whale with upperparts ranging in color from dark brown to lead gray or blackish in color; underparts paler, but not whitish; occasionally head and upper back whitish; beak moderately prominent and the forehead rising rather sharply; lower jaw longer than upper; pectoral fin relatively small and the dorsal fin placed on posterior third of body; prominent keel extends from dorsal fin to tail; skull with length of rostrum less than twice its breadth at notch; lower jaw of males with one large tooth (about 7 cm in length and 4 cm in diameter) at the tip; in females the teeth are small and seldom break through the gums so that the animal appears to be toothless; two converging grooves on throat. Total length of adults, 5-7 m. Weight, 2.5-4.5 metric tons.
Distribution in Texas. Sparsely distributed throughout tropical and subtropical waters of the world. In the western North Atlantic, these whales are found from Massachusetts to Florida and the Gulf of Mexico.
Habits. Little is known of this whale beyond information revealed by stranded specimens. They are often observed in groups of 10-25. These whales are deep divers and may remain below water for 30 minutes or longer. They are known to eat squid, fish, crabs, and starfish.
The reproductive habits are almost unknown. There does not seem to be a distinct breeding season as calves are born year round. Calves are about 2.1 m long at birth. The length of gestation is unknown.” (16)
D.J.Coffey (1977) also notes that:
“...the male has a pair of teeth at the point of the lower jaw. In the female these do not erupt” (17)
As every report on this particular stranding has stated the animal was a female. This satisfactorily refutes any allegations that it would have been mutilated by souvenir hunters even if they had had the time, the opportunity or the motive, which is very questionable.
Another story in the Exmouth Herald a week later proclaimed:
“Hankies out for whale
Exmouth foiled out a carpet of polythene to bring ashore its most unusual visitor. a rare Cuvier's beaked whale on Friday morning. The 20ft. whale had been washed up dead on rocks at Otter Cove near Exmouth, and became a television celebrity overnight. But before experts from the Royal Albert Museum in Exeter could begin examining the five-ton female whale, thieves sawed off part of her lower law and two front teeth.
The whale was then washed away on the tide but found again in the estuary of the River Otter, at Budleigh Salutation. On Friday's high tide, Royal Marines from Limestone Camp secured lines around the whale and towed her out to sea as staff from the Exmouth Dock Company laid out a polythene carpet down Mamhead slipway on the pierheard.
As the whale was brought alongside by the Marines a line was thrown ashore to waiting dockers. A crowd of more than 100 watched the whale being pulled up the polythene carpet until the line broke. It was then a case of the one that got away as the whale drifted out to sea before the Marines nudged her back on to the slipway with inflatable boats. A new line was attached to the whale, which was pulled slowly up the sllpway and on to the road.
Several people reached for their handkerchiefs as the whale was lifted on to a waiting lorry - not to wipe away a tear, but to cover their noses. The carcass was then taken to a knacker's yard at Newton Abbot where staff from the museum began the task of stripping off the flesh. Mr. David Bolton. one of the museum team, said.' "We now know that the whale had a number of broken ribs and there was evidence of internal bleeding. This points to it having been hit by a ship or thrown across some rocks. "The whale had a punctured lung and a more detailed examination of the skeleton will provide some idea of her age.” (18)
The Ziphiidae, the family to which Cuvier`s beaked whale belongs is poorly known and full of so many zoological surprises that it has excited cryptozoologists as well as their brethren in the more mainstream branches of the narural sciences for many years.
Bernard Heuvelmans, the Belgian zoologist known universally as “The father of Cryptozoology” (19) waxed lyrical on the subject in 1968:
“No family of whales is so mysterious as the Ziphiidae, or 'Beaked Whales', which are really dolphins. Hyperoodon is the only one of its five genera which is at all common and the only one which has been known since the beginning of the last century. There seem to be several different species of Hyperoodon, or Bottlenose, reaching a length of about 30 feet, but the one most unlike the others is known almost entirely from skulls washed up in the Southern Hemisphere. Yet Hyperoodon has been caught only in the North Atlantic.
Cuvier's Whale (Ziphius) was first thought to be extinct when Georges Cuvier described in 1823 a partly petrified skull that had been washed up in the Mediterranean in 1804. Nearly half a century after the first stranding another was washed up in the same place. Later a whole specimen with an identical skeleton was found in New Zealand. Oddly enough in old specimens the skull is almost petrified, fossilised before its time, and in other respects it seems designed to fool the naturalist, for it is light above and dark below, thus breaking all the rules of animal coloration.
Mesoplodon is perhaps the most puzzling genus of all. It was first known from a carcase washed up at Elgin in Scotland and examined by Sowerby. It was brown and had a strangely curved lower jaw with only two teeth. In 1825 a similar beast, but with no teeth at all, was stranded alive at Le Havre. It lived for two days, and sightseers who had odd ideas about cetacean's diet-tried to feed it on bread soaked in water. Henri Ducrotay de Blainville studied it and christened it Aodon dalei on account of its absence of teeth, but subsequent scientists have said that it was just a Sowerby's Whale that had lost its teeth with age. It could well have been a female, for they are often found to be toothless. In 1850 Paul Gervais gave the species the name Mesoplodon bidens, which it has kept ever since. Meanwhile several different species of Mesoplodon have been reported, but their descriptions are based on so little evidence that it is hard to say whether there are ten or fifteen of them. One of the rarest is Gervais's Whale (Mesoplodon europaeus) of which only six specimens are known. The first was found floating in the English Channel in 1840; but the next three were washed up on the coast of New Jersey in 1889, 1933 and '935, and the last two, a mother and child, in Jamaica in 1953, which was rather unfortunate for a supposedly 'European' animal. Blainville's Whale (M densirostris) has an even more bizarre distribution. Only seven specimens have been found, but they could hardly have been farther apart: in the Seychelles, on Lord Howe Island, south of Africa, near Massachusetts, in Madeira and New Jersey. M stejnegeri is known only from two specimens from the Pacific coast of North America, and M. hectori from two specimens in New Zealand. The description of M bowdoini is also based on two New Zealand specimens, but as they were only skeletons we still know nothing about their external appearance. And I need hardly say that we know absolutely nothing about the habits of the various Mesoplodons, which are sometimes more than 15 feet long.
We hardly know more about the two species of Berardius, Arnoux's and Baird's Whales, which were first described in 1851 and 1883, and which may be over 40 feet long. The second has teeth which no mammalogist would have believed in had they been described by a layman, for they are embedded in cartilaginous sacs, and it seems that they can be erected at will. New species of Ziphiidae continue to be discovered. As recently as 1937 Oliver had to create a new genus, Tasmacetus, after three Beaked Whales of a hitherto unknown type were stranded in New Zealand. They were between 23 and 29 feet long; yet people still say that the sea cannot hold any large unknown animals.” (20)
In the thirty years since Heuvelmans wrote the above passage, the Ziphiidae have given up a few of their secrets and presented us with many more.
REFERENCES
14 [URL: www.nsrl.ttu.edu/tmot/ziphcavi.htm]
15 COFFEY, D.J. An Encyclopaedia of Sea Mammals (Hart davis/McGibbon, London, 1977)
16 The Exmouth Herald October 2nd 1987
17 I don`t know who first coined this appelation but I think it was French cryptozoologist Michel Raynal
18. HEUVELMANS B In the wake of the Sea Serpents (Hart-Davis, London, 1968 1st English ed.)
19. Chris Basford pers.comm.
20. As cited in Sightings, Dec 1997
15 COFFEY, D.J. An Encyclopaedia of Sea Mammals (Hart davis/McGibbon, London, 1977)
16 The Exmouth Herald October 2nd 1987
17 I don`t know who first coined this appelation but I think it was French cryptozoologist Michel Raynal
18. HEUVELMANS B In the wake of the Sea Serpents (Hart-Davis, London, 1968 1st English ed.)
19. Chris Basford pers.comm.
20. As cited in Sightings, Dec 1997
Rising of the Moon is, by the way, available through Xiphos books
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