Rare whale likely died from head trauma, tests show

“I’ll be honest, I didn’t think we were going to work out what happened to it because it was fairly decomposed,” he said.

“But towards the end of the exam, we found some haemorrhage and evidence trauma around the head, and I think that is significant,” he said.

“It’s consistent with some form of physical trauma being a cause of that animal’s death but what caused it is impossible to say.”

He added: “It’s not a pattern of trauma I’ve seen before, we are speculating there was beach damage elsewhere, or something happened to it out there, we just don’t know.”