Photo: Henderson Et Al // Marine Mammal Science
No matter what we think we know about the ocean, there’s somehow more mysteries to uncover. After five years of searching, researchers have finally identified and photographed a rare tusked whale that had never before been seen alive. The discovery happened in June of 2024, off the coast of Baja California in Mexico, and the findings were published this year in the journal Marine Mammal Science.
The species they found was the ginkgo-toothed beaked whale (Mesoplodon ginkgodens). The whale is named for its unusual-shaped teeth, which fan out like the leaves of a ginkgo plant and protrude out the sides of their mouths into small tusks. While the species had previously been spotted washed ashore and in bycatch, the animals had never before been seen alive and at sea.
As study lead author Elizabeth Henderson told Live Science, the discovery was five years in the making. “Myself and some of the other folks on this trip (Gustavo Cardenas, Jay Barlow) spent five years looking for these whales; we spent every year since 2020 searching off Baja to find them, and that effort and determination paid off with a huge reward,” she said.
The search started with a sonar signal – an echolocation pulse called BW43. At first, the researchers thought the source of the call was a Perrin’s beaked whale. After years of listening to the ocean with microphones and scanning the surface with binoculars, they finally spotted a few juvenile beaked whales surfacing.
However, in order to positively identify the animals, the scientists needed to take a biopsy. In order to do that, study co-author Robert Pitman shot one of them with a crossbow outfitted with a modified punch-tip arrow. The device collected a pencil eraser-sized chunk of skin from the whale, which was preserved and later processed in a laboratory that sequenced and analyzed the whale’s DNA.
“I can’t even describe the feeling because it was something that we had worked towards for so long,” Henderson told The Guardian. “Everybody on the boat was cheering because we had it, we finally had it.”
“Beaked whales are the largest, least-known animals left on the planet,” Pitman told Live Science. “It is exciting to think that there [are] still organisms here on earth that weigh over a ton and have never been identified alive in the wild.”