Elusive marine mammal washes up on New Zealand beach

The world’s rarest whale, the spade-toothed beaked whale, has been seen on a New Zealand beach for the first time. Previously, the existence of this species was only known from a few bones, according to a new Current Biology paper.

The sighting is good news as it proves this rare animal still exists, however the mother and her male calf were not spotted alive and it is believed they became stranded and died on the beach.

The discovery actually happened two years ago and it's only after DNA analysis that the identification of the rare species was made. At first, they were incorrectly identified as being the much more common Gray's beaked whales.

Rochelle Constantine of the University of Auckland commented: "This is the first time this species - a whale over five metres in length - has ever been seen as a complete specimen, and we were lucky enough to find two of them. Up until now, all we have known about the spade-toothed beaked whale was from three partial skulls collected from New Zealand and Chile over a 140-year period. It is remarkable that we know almost nothing about such a large mammal."

Constantine suspects that the whales "are simply an offshore species that lives and dies in the deep ocean waters and only rarely wash ashore. New Zealand is surrounded by massive oceans. There is a lot of marine life that remains unknown to us."