It is the world’s rarest whale, with only seven of its kind ever spotted, but none have ever been seen alive, and none ever studied…until this week. Scientist from around the world pulled a specimen, found washed up on a beach in July, out of a refrigerated storage unit. The spade toothed whale will be slowly dissected hoping to find out a little bit more about the mysterious mammal. Almost nothing is known about the enigmatic species. The list of what scientists don’t know about spade-toothed whale is longer than what they do know. They don’t know where in the ocean the whales live, why they’ve never been spotted in the wild, or what their brains look like.
All beaked whales have different stomach systems and researchers don’t know how the spade-toothed processes its food. They don’t know how this one died. It’s thought that spade-toothed whales live in the vast southern Pacific ocean, home to some of the world’s deepest ocean trenches. Beaked whales are the ocean’s deepest divers for food, and the spade-toothed may rarely surface, adding to its mystery. It’s thought that there could be a million more undiscovered species living in the ocean, as 80% of the world’s ocean remains unexplored.
