A carcass of a rare beaked whale was found ashore Friday on Plymouth Long Beach in Massachusetts. Biologists at the New England Aquarium are now investigating why the rarely seen whale got washed up ashore.
Residents first spotted the beaked whale ashore at 10 a.m. and immediately reported it to the officials. It was stuck on a rocky area, making it difficult to remove it. Plymouth harbormaster Chad Hunter helped remove the carcass with a crane by 5 p.m., Boston Globe reported.
The 17-foot beaked whale is a female and weighs nearly a ton with dark skin and a slender snout. Aquarium biologists and staff from the International Fund for Animal Welfare are performing a necropsy on the whale and they think that it is a Sowerby's beaked whale, who often swim 200 miles offshore in the North Atlantic, according to SFGate.
"They are so rarely seen that New England Aquarium biologists have been conferring to determine the exact species, which they believe to be a Sowerby's beaked whale. Aquarium staff last handled a beaked whale in 2006 in Duxbury," the New England Aquarium said to CBS Local.
Unlike other beached whlaes, the officials said that they didn't see any scars on the body of the beaked whale indicating that it didn't get hit by any vessel or escaped a net of a fisherman. The necropsy results are not yet available to the public.
